La Belle Dame Sans Merci
by elveljung
Summary: Life goes on after Sasuke's departure, except for how it doesn't. Three years after Valley at the End, Naruto is trying to mend broken promises, and Sasuke's just trying not to break. Mainly Narusasu. Dark themes.
1. Sorry, Dropout Boy

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 01:**

"**Sorry, Dropout Boy, But this is Reality"**

**Please note** that at this point _La Belle_ has become AU, seeing as it only follows canon up to and including episode 135 of the anime series. At the time I wrote it, I had not watched any of Shippuden, nor read any of the post-timeskip manga. _La Belle _is also an experiment in many ways (most prominently: is it possible to make something genuine and coherent out of fandom clichés?), and I can only hope it is enjoyable. Please feel free to leave feedback, which is always muchly appreciated.

xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxx

Life goes on after Sasuke's departure.

Only, not really.

"I mean," Naruto would say, "if you can call it life."

He's very young in the forest where he throws agitated kicks and kunai at trees that refuse to budge and calls it training.

Because life, if you can call it that, is a broken promise. He's not going to break _his_ promise, though. It sounds so selfless when he declares that, but really, it's not. He suffers the tearing there deep inside where nothing from the outside world can reach to touch, and to banish it he needs Sasuke, and to fight Sasuke he must find Sasuke, and it's all such a gigantic shattered _mess_ (because once you love someone you don't just stop, that's not how it works and how could it be).

Nothing seems real these days, with only the bleak pain to remind me I'm not dead.

It's Country of the Wave all over again.

Except Country of the Wave had a happy ending, and belief is more brittle than it used to be.

There are a hundred thousand things he wants to express, but he knows if (_when_, please when, i'm going to bloody make it when) he meets Sasuke again they'll fight. They've done that often enough, and Naruto has the inkling it would be one of those struggles during which he suddenly discovers he's no longer angry, just has the dim idea somehow Sasuke is _real_.

He might scream it over the wasteland that is their battleground and his life: that Sasuke has never been kind or companionable or likeable or easy. That he's still the only one who's been truly close, who's gotten beneath Naruto's skin, bitching at the flesh and bones there below. Gotten inside. That Sasuke is real – impossible to ignore or dismiss or forget. Impossible to surpass or replace.

To move on past.

Even if Naruto touched Sakura-chan, like he sometimes sort of admits to himself that she'll never let him, he harbors the lurking suspicion she wouldn't be real under his hands. That she isn't the one that can matter, any more than Iruka-sensei or Kakashi-sensei or anyone else.

He was alive through the maddening pain in The Valley at the End, shockingly unquestioningly brutally vivid. Afterwards, ground down and apart below Sasuke's feet as he departed, death has started gradually intruding. It sure as hell isn't life, at least.

Life goes on but it doesn't _go on_. It's still here and days come and pass, but they don't _get_ anywhere, can't move past Sasuke or the absence he left.

One morning out of every five they assemble as Team Seven, and it's a bloody joke. As if they were still Team Seven, as if any of it still mattered, the missions and the training. Naruto wants to say: It does matter, matters too goddamn much, and precisely because of that you have to give me a real mission so I can find Sasuke and make things right and whole again, you have to give me real training so I can be better than this world and keep my promises.

Kakashi-sensei usually declares they do have a mission, the formula that once raised such enthusiasm, held so much power. Sakura-chan sometimes believes, she confessed once when she could blame teary eyes on the glaring sun, that Kakashi-sensei rarely trains them because he doesn't know how. No, really, it makes sense if you think about it: he's a genius, and none of us are, you know that. Sasuke, though, he was too. So Kakashi-sensei could train him, and we just tagged along. He's no idea what to do with just us, though.

It doesn't make all that much sense to Naruto, but few of Sakura-chan's reasonings do and they're usually correct (and maybe it does make a little bit of horrible sense, like sakura-chan knowing sasuke was going to leave, except naruto refuses a reality that supports that sort of sense).

Suppose it's true, then, and he's just so sad his breathing hurts. Obviously Kakashi-sensei doesn't know what to do with just them; Naruto himself has no idea what to do with just Naruto save regain what has been lost, become whole again. _Unbreak me_.

In reality Tsunade decided that with her life framed by the Ninja War she has had enough precious people taken away, instructed Kakashi to the extent that: "If Naruto gets too cocky he'll try for Orochimaru on his own, and then we'll lose both of them." She didn't need to say: If you train him too well we won't be able to stop him.

Kakashi does not necessarily agree with the sentiment but doesn't argue, it's not his decision and every time it was he lost his precious people. Too bad I didn't stop making my own faulty choices until I didn't have anyone left.

Sometimes he's tempted to comment that death isn't the only threat that might take your loved ones, but Orochimaru's looming presence ought to be proof of that already, and anyway people can be precious without being properly loved. He knows that rather better than he'd have liked to.

"What kind of mission?" Naruto asks now, suspiciously, and in the space between the words Kakashi clearly hears the maddening fear and frustration caused by months and months of meaningless nothingness.

"We're going to hunt some bandits," he says, watches the stark distrust on Naruto's face blur tentatively.

All in all, if he looks at it critically, the time since Sasuke's deflection has given Naruto almost nothing. Too shattered by the Uchiha business to manage effectively improving on his own and offered no help, he's been stuck on basically the same level he was when his teammate disappeared.

Sasuke's a different matter, of course. Kakashi isn't sure what that kid knows or wants anymore.

What he does know is that the little shit left, and if Kakashi had been what he was supposed to be, that would not have happened (should-have-beens, so many of them).

Hell, he doesn't remember why he quit the ANBU anyway – he's much more skilled at killing people than at living with them, always was.

Only, he could be better at that too:

He looks at Sakura and Naruto during the battle with the robbers, and they didn't grow up during the Ninja War, they didn't accept their Chuunin badges with lifeblood sticking to their six-year-old hands. Out of some misguided idea about protecting them (and where would he ever have learned anything about that because his parents sure as hell never tried it with him but never mind) he only snaps necks and kicks through spines when his students aren't watching.

Oh god, he's trying to be _better _for them, now it's too late.

He'd laugh, except stupidity and unfairness are only funny when they happen to other people (not even then, not really, but learning to laugh at everything was an invaluable life lesson).

From childhood missions until four years ago Kakashi was a killer by routine so ingrained it was almost instinct, was famous for it, because it's simplest and cleanest and dead opponents don't return to make more trouble. ANBU prodigy, you know.

But things happen (uchiha sasuke happened).

Kakashi used to turn up every year with a test, couldn't be bothered to even invent a new one, read a few chapters of _Icha Icha Paradise_ and let the kids try and fail to get his bells, just to have tangible justification for turning them down and pursuing his solo career as a slightly-alcoholic hit man.

Three years ago was much the same; he remained laconic in his response to the Third's hint of assigning him an Uchiha.

No, I've never wanted a son or a little brother, thanks.

But Sasuke wasn't anything like Obito, Naruto was, and Kakashi's one eye, which has never been allowed the grace of turning away from the difficult things, registered with cold lack of mercy that Sasuke knew death and the other two had never been touched by it. That whereas all Uchiha hail from the same blood-darkness and are shaped by it, Naruto should be nothing like his parents whom he hadn't even known but Kakashi had, but he was, he is.

Things happen. Things change; hell, even Kakashi was innocent once.

Coward that he is, not teacher material, Kakashi doesn't kill in front of them, and the bandits number plentiful, more skilled than they ought to have been, and Naruto is shattered and sloppy. Because of a lot of things, all these reasons and all the other unspoken ones there always are, Naruto ends up shell-shocked on his knees with his hand clean out on the far side of a man's chest.

Fucking hell (yeah, you _wish_ there's fucking in the place you're heading) and Kakashi drops the charade like he dons the mask, stops playing at being a ninja for all audiences. Rated and angry and hating himself he's a kid again (still; if you were an adult when you were a child you can't properly grow up, can you) and no stranger to corpses.

"He's dead," Naruto says in the sterile voice of those whose entire life has been taken over by not letting trauma take over their life. "I, I, I didn't – didn't mean to kill him."

"I know," Kakashi says. Lying is cowardice, but cowardice is underrated, and the truth only makes things worse. "It's alright."

Sakura stares with one trembling hand covering her mouth as he grabs the corpse, still attached to Naruto's impaling limb, beautiful murderer's hands holding on to its shoulders while he wrenches it free, so much meaningless meat.

Not a suitable teacher after all, since at heart he's just never been nor wanted to be a people person (not since the precious people were taken away, and that was very long ago), he isn't sure what to do with this.

The Fourth, who was a people person, made things alright again after Kakashi had slain his first man. He doesn't exactly remember how, though.

Moreover, the Fourth Hokage is dead. Life sucks and then you die, and Kakashi can't seem to formulate any kind of coherent sentence expressing the general thesis that inadvertently taking people's lives is a beautiful intrinsic part of enjoying the springtime of your youth.

He should have known, did know, that there was a reason he refused all those others teams. This one was just too much like the old Team Seven, and he's failed them now like he failed Obito and Rin. If he'd been a responsible adult and sent them back to the Academy where Iruka would have taken care of them, the dumb childish man shaped by the kindness of being inadequate for the battlefield, then they would've ended up with a real teacher and maybe they would not have been so broken.

"Come on," he says (a ninja who's made it to adulthood doesn't complain about being on the right end of the killing).

_(I'll make my own Way of the Ninja!_ and kakashi wants so desperately to believe, but he is not foolish enough to let himself)

He was never a dreamer and never selfless, but what few hopes he had left (after his father and his mother and obito and finally rin too) the Fourth took with him when he passed away, and the child who was sharp enough to sparkle blends in perfectly now in this graying world that's all that's left.

He says, harsher than intended, "You're not hurt, are you? Stand up."

"O-okay." His knees shake like a pitiful fucking fox cub.

Kakashi watches with what strives and fails to be laconic detachment as Sakura scrambles up as well and hurries towards Naruto, trembling steps stumbling over the corpse, one foot landing hard on the slippery dead chest. She doesn't slow down – too terrified to register what's happening?

Nah, she might've replied, the pink baby is tougher than that now, with grim realism hardening her.

Nah, Kakashi decides. Only people too strong or dumb or lonely to fear death delude themselves into believing they can afford entertaining crises over killing, and if he were as weak as she he'd have killed himself from sheer horror long ago. He's never been a fan of fright.

With Kyuubi eagerly licking its jaws inside his blood-drenched mind, Naruto kicks helplessly at the trunk of a nearby tree until he can look past the dead one without swallowing vomit.

"Move on," Kakashi tells him. "It's going to be alright." He makes himself grin, with little effort. Cheer is better than agony, always (sometimes cheer is agony, but not yet). "Now, we need to hurry up a bit or you'll be late for the ceremony."

Before she can bellow at him that changing the topic from death to a wedding (before the corpse is even cold, oh shit, oh my god), Sakura is struck by a kind of insight. A glimpse behind the mask, if you will.

These exact facts are not clear to her, but years and years ago Kakashi is nine and standing in a clearing he's fought his way to, studying his blood-splashed attire with dull distaste: it will be hell to get the stains out. And this is when he discovers he's lost count of how many he has killed. It is at once very surprising (because few things escape his unstoppable genius mind's automatic recording) and not surprising at all (because he always knew to refuse keeping conscious count).

That was then; this is now. The line is not as clear or steady as it should be, blurring and momentarily blindsiding.

But Naruto shapes up again once they're back in the village, wide grin below laughter-closed eyes and no pain at all left in his expression. There's just the everyday variety of it now, the never-ending agony clinging to his shoulders, shadowing his steps, worn with the recognized familiarity of a particularly favored piece of clothing.

Kakashi muses that the Hyuuga have been inbreeding without his help for many generations already and will no doubt manage today's wedding too without his support. He has none to offer.

What he does have is a well-filled liquor cabinet. He got drunk for the first time when he was eleven; resisted the silent siren call for years and years, although with slips, and now… Now he doesn't think he cares all that much about trying.

Everything you try fails you anyway, so what's the point?

He looks into his own eyes, dark muddled gray and stolen red in the scarecrow face. He has nothing to tell himself, nothing that can be said.

He shrugs. Yeah well, everyone's pathetic, I just don't bother trying to obscure it anymore.

He takes the appropriate flasks from the cabinet and the world becomes mercifully soft; the sharp edges aren't removed, but they're hidden and he has learned that that is enough.

One emptying of the rather large mug: and he is a child again, before the killing and the comrades gained and lost, blood falling chilled and slimy on his face, which he has tilted back, its eyes wide as it measures the distance to his father hanging from the ceiling (no harakiri for the shamed man).

Another knock-back, practiced steadily since that first time he got wasted when he was a kid: Obito, and the images are moving faster now, one rock crushing the boy's body, another bearing his name. Kakashi screaming at the piece of fucking black basalt that thinks it means anything at all, dares scorn the survivors with the notion death can be anything but loss.

Third emptying: the Fourth Hokage's name on the Heroes' Stone.

Fourth: his mother gone, and Rin, and no heroics, no saving to be had. Heroes are the only ones ever remembered, but it's never just the heroes who die. Kakashi's girls did, and were forgotten by the village that had killed them, before and after the loss of the Yellow Flash, of the man who was too bright and animated to be caught in rock and carvings. Kakashi lets himself marvel, sometimes, that the administration of the village has yet to learn what he knew before he made Genin: that it's better to let the dead lie, it hurts so much less that way (sometimes he wants to crush the stone of heroes).

Fifth, because he is going to drink himself to hell to prove his sober life isn't: goddamn Uchiha fucking Sasuke, Kakashi's look in Obito's eyes, my last lost chance to fucking do something right. _Unbreak us_.

Sixth: and Obito's grinning at him, and everything that could have been, and Rin's kind hands, the Fourth ruffling his hair; smiling up at his father, his mother singing him to sleep long after he told her she needn't

Seventh: he is dreaming, and he was never a ninja, he died when he was still innocent. His students weren't so broken, under someone else's hand.

Eighth: life's a bitch Kakashi isn't in love with anymore. Save for the kids he'd leave her.

Ninth: go to hell, all the people in my memories, except I don't think my apartment is large enough for all of you.

Tenth: alcoholic comas are the best kind, the only good one.

The wedding too is drunken business, but it has not quite yet commenced. Naruto, who has learned greater respect for punctuality since Sasuke's disappearance because there's not a second to waste, not a second that isn't agony, is at the grounds in fairly good time, stands around talking with grins and overdone gestures, having words with Shikamaru Chuunin of Leaf and Temari his girlfriend from Sand. She's made Jounin, Naruto thinks.

It might have mattered once.

Before the Chuunin Exam following the one that ended so badly was postponed and his team missed the next one because they were looking for Sasuke, and no one had the energy after that to commit heresy by suggesting the remnants of Team Seven try it with an outsider. Hell can be a fiercely private place, their hell is theirs and Sasuke alone is welcome.

So Naruto's a Genin and he doesn't care. He's beaten Jounin and he doesn't care. The ranks are all bullshit anyway; I kicked the conceited lying ass of a Chuunin instructor before I was even out of grade school, didn't I?

If only it had mattered.

Shikamaru shakes his head at him because it's too troublesome to laugh, slings an arm around the convenient girl-shoulders next to him since she leans discreetly closer the way that indicates he should, and anyway it's what they both need after that god-awful family dinner they've just endured.

Those who believe Shikamaru was unfortunate to involve himself with the family of Gaara and Kankurou obviously lack any comprehension of the situation. A couple remarks about his good friend Naruto plus a few pictures of same, and Shikamaru could enjoy the heartening security of knowing Gaara was ninety percent certain to hesitate before massacring him because blood is pretty.

Those who believe that's grave have not suffered through a family dinner with his alcoholic father and frigid mother. Temari has, and so has he, and she's a warm weight against his side. Comfortable there, and staying.

Having a girlfriend is a damn hassle, true, but regardless of whatever preferences he might have had on the subject she did smile kindness at him in the soft-sharp lamplight of the hospital after Uchiha fucking Sasuke left, and she did put her arms around his neck and tell him he was an incompetent fucking baby who would have been better off staying home sucking on his mom's tits for a bit longer, but now he was here how about he suck on hers instead?

He did. She was tangible and lively in his arms, then and later, after he'd had the first men under his command killed. She'd saved his sorry ass, actually, when the image of falling comrades overpowered any forming plans in his mind. Maybe it was not so strange: the Genin Exam in Leaf requires its taker to successfully perform a basic transformation technique, while in Sand its completion demands a death by the examinee's hands. She was vivid, though. Still is.

Naruto used to be. Shikamaru hopes to hell that goddamn Uchiha who stole it from him puts the vividness to good use, or Shikamaru intends to fucking kill him.

Temari might miss him when he's failed; I've read the reports. It's troublesome, but if he lets the Jounin handle the brainy stuff they'll all wind up dead, and no matter what Naruto thought and fought for then (and he might have learned better since), the one who had the truth of it was the boy with the knowledge craved into his being that even bereft of its wings a bird must eventually seek the sky:

_Sorry, dropout boy, but this is reality._

There's a reason Shikamaru's neck remains unmarked by dark powers. Well, if you don't count Temari's sex drive among aforementioned dark powers. He's too pragmatic, too smart, not good enough.

He sighs, rests his eyes.

Further into the crowd, swarmed by friends and teammates, one can glimpse Kiba, a wild thing lost in the sea of humanity. And, it might be added, appearing perfectly content with this state of affairs. Least so long as he has Akamaru with him, and he always does, today proving no exception. It hardly could, since a frantic Kiba going berserk during the wedding is not on anyone's wish-list.

Despite attending the ceremony with good humor (though growing uncertain from dawning distress born of his girl teammate's scent being that of a prey animal playing dead whilst the predator chews on her flesh) Kiba has never given much thought to marriage. It's a part of life, but nothing acute, nothing he feels truly concerns him. Girls just are.

Most particularly, love isn't related to females, save of course for his mom and sister and the bitches, love is a wet black nose nuzzling against his skin, is lying curled tight amongst the warmth of mutual skin and pulsing blood, the smell of belonging thick around them.

He bends over Akamaru and breathes in the scent, but knows:

Hinata is watching Naruto (this is not a first by far).

With her Byakugan (this is).

Propriety was ingrained in her numbingly, unchangeably long ago. But she has reached at last the stage towards which she has been struggling all her life, has nothing left that can be taken from her.

Naruto she will never gain and so cannot lose, and finally she has conceded defeat and ceased to hope and thus has been made free to act upon this.

Before she can approach him, however, someone else does, and she watches it reduced to the mere spectator she's so weary of being.

"Hey, Neji!" Naruto calls with enthusiasm she can't definitely identify as faked or earnest, administering a slap to the Hyuuga's back. Being untouchable does not work around Naruto, Neji knows that. "Congrats on tying the knot! Guess you and Hinata really did start getting along better, right?"

Neji can feel his wings rot unused on his body, caught in a cage too slim for him to spread them. Says, because that kind of internal vermin breeds all kinds of twisted darkness, and because Naruto's eyes are the blue of the sky he knows he can never reach: "_Amai no Jutsu_."

Naruto's look at him changes completely, from bland amusement to something too raw to be described in human terms.

Whom does he see? Neji bides his time, and after a short length of same Naruto breathes, "Hey, smile for me, will you?"

He's smiling himself, a soft unstoppable expression too brittle to be touched. His chest hitches against Neji's.

"Why?" Neji asks from the other side of the genjutsu. He knows it can't be him that Naruto is looking at. For the moment he does not care. Might kill someone later, though. Not now.

"'Cause it just struck me it was so long since I saw it and I – miss it." He sounds like he's choking.

Hinata thinks he might be ready to cry.

"I'll smile for only you," Neji breathes against Naruto's mouth, hands uncertainly, unaccustomedly soft on Naruto's shoulders, and briefly he wonders where his words are coming from. For Naruto only I will inch the corners of my mouth upward, curve my lips in unused invitation.

Naruto watches with his eyes filled with blue – unspilled tears over blue irises or madness, and you believe what you want to believe, don't you? Like he believed for so long in getting strong enough to trip inevitable destiny up when she strove to walk past them in all her torn ruining glory, save he can't believe now, not in this.

Not when the smile he's shown is tempting and shining and achingly, accusingly, absolutely hollow. "That's not your smile," he says. "That's like – that's nothing but a substitute for tears."

The illusion-mask cracks at that, the false expression of gladness falling away to reveal pale wretched weariness, and it doesn't matter how his stomach is clenching with the anticipation of pain to come, not when it's so much like how it should have been (one of my might-have-beens, one of the precious ones). The person in front of him inches forward slow and graceful, and Naruto's gasp isn't surprised.

His mouth inches open, warm under Neji's, two bodies clumsy with ardency clutch at each other, sliding together. With bruises forming on him from Naruto's grip, wetness that might be Naruto's tears or snot or saliva or his own sliding down his chin and Naruto pressed between Neji's body and the wall, Neji disregards his chocked panting and the bitter-sweetness swelling crushing inside him and just looks at this slip of a boy he has no real reason to want. Know that I do, irreversibly (fate is like that). Indescribably much.

Too much, by far too much, for the Amai no Jutsu to be fair.

"…ke," Naruto breathes unevenly, face open and worn and desirous, shaking in his arms. "Sasuke, Sasuke, Sasuke."

The jutsu melts away and leaves him dangling in Hyuuga Neji's arms.

Hinata still watches, bereft of sound but never of sight, studies her cousin's deft movements as he disentangles and waits for Naruto to come back to them; realizes belatedly that he has been at least partially gone since he went to The Valley at the End and returned with one half of a broken promise.

Shock can't quite reach him through the ache. "You're getting married!" he sneers. "How can you do that to Hinata?"

There may be a reason after all, it dawns on Neji. Might be a real reason he wants this slip of a boy. He'll analyze it later, after nursing his introvert mind back together. _Unbreak him_.

It is in the very essence of Naruto to refuse understanding of arranged marriages and of what forces people into them: Neji discovers it is possible for him to smile, in spite of everything, but doesn't.

"You said Hyuuga would be made to change," he explains, serene almost in the anguish. "Make no mistake, I grew to believe you. As of yet, however, Hyuuga is what it has always been."

Naruto would punch him if he could find the energy to move.

Unaffected and bred for brilliance Hyuuga Neji turns on his heel, declares with that detached solemnity he has, soiling himself at last with honesty: "I won't bother you again, Dropout Boy." A bird has it in him to fly, but wings rot and vermin live in their rot. There is a sky though, blue and untenable as Naruto's eyes: he adds, just before he is out of earshot, "I'll serve you as Hokage."

Hokage? Someone still believes in that, still _cares_ about that? Naruto laughs softly because I have seen a Hokage try to reclaim Sasuke and I have seen her fail.

_Why did I let him kiss me?_

Maybe for the same reason he can't give up, the reason that forces him to remain now slumped against the smooth cold wall.

Just before she is to ascend the platform on which the ceremony is to take place Hinata hurries, as best she can when forced by the billowing purple silk wrapped around her person to limit herself to a sedate gait, to his side. She looks down at him, bowed blond head that has dried its tears and is grinning pain again when it rights itself, with something akin to judgment.

Naruto perceives it, and starts. However, it is not directed at him primarily.

For being uttered in so hasty a rush they lean on each other, her words, whispered urgently under her ragged breath, are distinct: "_Naruto you don't understand this is the duty of one who carries a Bloodline Limit but I'm afraid I mean aren't I always but_."

Shocked into compliance he lets her kiss him. Gradually it comes to him that the coldness earlier was not meant for him, and he could have shrugged away save he knows what it is to crave. One of her arms stretches across his neck, helping to press her body to his, all of it soft. Even the little bit of tongue is innocent.

Because his mind moves in circles found in a Sharingan eye (translation: because i am an idiot, and proud in my way, and _i_ _will not, i cannot, give up_) he remembers another kiss, a first kiss, a hard shove in the back; shock and air that smelled of chalk and Sasuke's lips perfectly fitted against his, dry but open.

Fucking absurd, and it didn't mean anything except a split lip, courtesy of Sasuke's tooth.

Neji meant something, shrouded in Sasuke's face.

_Stop thinking._

Hinata kisses him and then she leaves: when his eyes are still wide, not the content closed arcs they were for a second with Neji-san, she fists her hand hard in the offensive fabric of her wedding kimono and walks away very fast, almost stumbles.

Hinata's wedding night is a textbook case, a study in the expected, an exercise in thoughts of a metaphorical England.

It hurts, but mostly because she has been told that it will; weak she might be, as far as the Hyuuga go, but that means merely that her experience of injury and pain is all the more extensive.

She fears his cold as she slips with shaking fingers out of her nightgown. Even her breasts, nipples hard from chill, tremble from how ragged with fear her breathing has become.

"I won't – I'm not going to force you," he says: she's on her back on white silken sheets, her body pale and clammy with cold sweat when she chances a quick glance at it, and she's gone through terrified into calm and wishes she could faint from fear for once, instead of due to embarrassment. Ironical, that; she'd likely have blacked out if it were Naruto about to push into her, but she'll have to stay conscious and aware for Neji-san.

The ironies of life, and the struggle to find them funny instead of bitter.

Not that it's this fault, exactly, any of it: he cares for her no more than she for him, and as she fears his cold eyes and colder hands he must resent her unmarked forehead, and his flesh is as innocent as hers in the ways of intimacy.

"You don't have to force me," she stammers, scared into frankness. "It is our duty to produce heirs more worthy than Hanabi or die so as to not stand in her way."

He nods after an instant of thought, the movement efficient and impersonal. Deft and decided like the fingers dispensing with his clothes, like his entering the futon. Though equally unused as she to the vulnerability of being watched naked, he has never regarded his body as anything for which he ought to be ashamed; he looks from his own bony thighs to her fleshier ones and swallows.

Consummating their marriage is a different experience for him, though she is not aware of this, different from how it is for her and different from how he presupposed it would be. It should be and has been assumed as a mere duty, a mechanical and vaguely distasteful requirement – a means to an end through shrouded in heavy physicality. However…

Never having expected anything from her, he is not surprised she stays unmoving as he leans over her, his hair spilling thick and dark over her body. Her eyes are closed beneath furrowed brows, her breast tense under his brushing finger.

Though he'd prefer better control over it above this proof it's working, his body is not unaffected.

He'd like for her, he thinks, not to hate him. This, however, does not come to him naturally the way new moves normally do, and hatred he has grown to learn to handle easily.

"Neji-niisan," she says, and he can't differentiate between utterings of pain and pleasure anymore: prior this event the association between the former sensation and his moan and involuntary shudder has been apparent and unquestioned (it isn't anymore. a lot of things aren't anymore).

"I," he says, afterwards. Still inside and reeling a little, her eyes yet closed. "I'm sorry?"

Her back is warm and sticky against his as he lies down by himself and tries to sleep: Hinata is ashamed to hope this one time will have been enough, that Neji-san's seed is already growing in her, while Neji is reluctant to admit he might have reason to be ashamed of hoping otherwise.

Next morning when everything should be normal Tenten looks at the struggling autumn-grass, Lee at Gai-sensei at the sky.

Because Gai likes to think in elaborate metaphors and poorly constructed similes he formulates it thusly in one of his darker moments: geniuses are born with the wings everyone else must train for, yet Neji does not fly.

You could say he is Kakashi bereft of wind beneath his wings, dropping feathers, and Gai… Gai might actually hate him for that.

Kurenai smiles sadly down at the blue-black crown of Hinata's customarily bowed head with a hand that strives to be supportive on the child's shoulder. Shino's silence is more bugging than usual and Kiba joins it, gaze flickering uncertainly between his girl teammate and the ground.

Hinata barely looks at Naruto, afterwards, her eyes on the floor more often than on Neji but on Neji more frequently than on Naruto – who supposes he was some kind of experiment that didn't turn out too well and shrugs the entire ordeal off.

After all, he has his own problems to (try and) deal with, and lacks the emotional energy to put others' troubles on his own shoulders anymore. Or, it's so pathetically, cheaply easy to be a hero of small people with small problems, a simple sickening thrill that can do nothing for him after a night alone with the fact he'd evidently let Sasuke kiss him. Allow Sasuke to stroke his lips into opening and his body into melting sweetness, his insides into a dizzying burn, a needy flutter all because of a stupid jutsu presuming to let you see whomever you truly want.

_Like I needed a genjutsu to show me that._

Denial's a fine thing, though. Things are hopeless and complicated enough without... without this, whatever it is.

Damn you Sasuke. Damn you because I love you and I hate you and you left. You are my family, my precious person, and you are not getting away.

Temari kisses him too this day following the wedding. Naruto actually rather likes her, these days, and so it's not an unpleasant surprise to find her planted firmly outside his door.

"Ah, Temari-san." He scratches his nose. "What are you doing here?"

"Ask Shikamaru," she says, altering between her two customary expressions of annoyed and gleeful. "That boy has some seriously weird ideas about appropriate bet losing penalties for his girlfriend. Jeez, a role-play or some shit wouldn't have surprised me, but this…"

While Naruto is still frantically attempting to come up with a tactful yet exceptionally firm way of declaring that he has absolutely no interest whatsoever in learning any details regarding what she and Shikamaru get up to in bed, thank you very much, Temari shakes her head and cups his face firmly in hands warm and rough as the desert sand.

It's nothing like Neji (heated but clumsy, an active experience on my part) or Hinata (tentative and guilty, me doing nothing). Temari blows his mind with a handful sweet slow kisses, so obviously a grown woman. It's just – she's very good at it, but it isn't about us.

"Have a good day," she says afterwards, grinning crookedly. "If you see Shikamaru, tell him I'm looking for him, okay?"

"A-ah," is all he can say, and she laughs and winks and saunters off, the pretty Jounin he has never known.

xxxxxxxxxx


	2. On the Edge of Lightning

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 02:**

"**On the Edge of Lightning"**

Someone laboring under the impression that this is a Tale of True Love would probably find it strange, but everyone involved knows it isn't about that, not really, and so it isn't surprising that it doesn't begin with the two them. In retrospect it will become peculiar, because it's all about us, isn't it? It wasn't then.

Life's a story about many people and about what breaks them.

One of these people is Uchiha Sasuke. He has nothing to do with Naruto, nor really with anyone outside the family. The concept of friends is alien, and unnecessary: he has something better, doesn't he? Mother, Father, Itachi-niisan.

Naruto too is friendless, lone wolf cub (fucking fox cub, we'll drown you, leave you in the forest), and if he did need people, like he craves water and air, he'd be dead, he knows that. There's just ANBU, who check on him once a day or so: the Third is not a strong Hokage.

Sarutobi knows all about the horrible twisted reality of the ancient clans, knows you don't touch that if you're an outsider, and turns a blind eye. He lost his confidence the day he lost Orochimaru (still doesn't know why the snake boy was his special one, and perhaps because of that there is absolutely no undoing it at all).

He's supposed to pick up the pieces after the Fourth, the Yellow Flash, their brilliant one, their laughter and courage, but can't bring himself to do it, just picks at them instead. Leaf isn't a happy place, he has known that for too long. How could it be, it's a ninja place.

But this isn't about him (hasn't been for a great many years; he has, and this too he knows with bleak lack of mercy, survived himself).

It's about a young man who will never gain the Mangekyou Sharingan for the devastatingly simple reason his best friend is a series of porn novels, rivaled only by a box of kinky sex toys, and due to the sad circumstance they have never been alive it is not the simplest of tasks to kill them.

It's about a boy who's lost everything and two boys who will lose everything.

It's about Sasuke, who fancies control is within his grasp when he's eight. About how his brother proves him wrong.

Because it isn't Sasuke who's restrained and unaffected, just the world around him: this is a time before outsiders, before the idea that he's supposed to care about and be involved with outsiders has ever been suggested, when his mother constitutes the single spot of mildness, normality. When he is the soft one, and allowed to be.

Itachi-niisan is very much his mother's son: it becomes increasingly clear to Sasuke that it is not their father who can smile while he stabs you lethally with no more than a glance, keep a thousand strategies ready in a focused, distanced mind.

She never stops being distanced, never lapses. Itachi-niisan does, once or twice.

Breath warm with sake, his touch grows at once rougher and more ardent. It's strange, and Sasuke prefers not to think about it in the light of day. He just lies there, starkly awake and wide-eyed, growing gradually drowsier in the weirdness, Itachi-niisan beside him. His brother always sleeps very close to him when he has returned from a mission, lies pressed to Sasuke smelling of blood and sweat, long hair sleek and tickling Sasuke's skin.

In the faint starlight before he closes them, his brother's eyes are red.

There are other times, too, of course there are. Itachi-niisan turning his back on him with voiced but perhaps insincere regret; Itachi-niisan lifting him effortlessly, playfully; Itachi -niisan chasing him around the training ground.

Sasuke loves him so much it hurts. Hating him hurts too.

Itachi-niisan rarely speaks of anything of importance, though is still a greater talker than Mother.

Intellectually Sasuke knows well that he's been part of her insides, but Itachi-niisan is closer, Itachi-niisan is recognition – admiration, respect, tangible and craved. Everything I've ever wanted (or thought i wanted).

Warm and tactile and infinitely removed, like the blood he spills during the span of dusk one day in early fall.

If you are truly in control you don't cry and scream and swear vengeance. If you are in control you kill your entire clan to determine whether it is within your capacity.

The conclusions are not hard to draw, and Sasuke's genius mind does not have much else to occupy it, however traumatized and never good enough it might be.

He runs through his home, runs from his home, from himself. He will never be whole again.

Then there is Itachi_(-niisan_?), and his eyes are red, Sharingan red, Mangekyou red, and Sasuke feels the power of them slip into his own mind, force its way into him, ripping reality apart.

_Tsukiyomi_, the original curse, the oldest and the worst. And this is when he first realizes that there are gaps in the fabric of the world, and that hell lies in wait for you between the layers of reality.

They find him afterwards, or Kakashi does, but the damage is done (irreparable? let's assume so, no point getting disappointed) and Sasuke is aware forevermore that what his senses show him is just a comfort blanket drawn over the true face of reality, which is red darkness under the full moon, shadows of the dead reaching for him.

He has to hide sometimes, falling into that unstructured mass of painful chaos, but he can pretend. Can force himself into believing that the world is stabile, and can feel safely hollow (the red-black is in him, with the numbness, where there was once a person, a different one, whole).

He lives in one of the houses situated close to the main mansion that has been his home for all the years of his childhood because the blood stains here are ones he can stand to clean away. Once a day a masked man stops by to drop off a meal, presumably to check he's still breathing. Sasuke does not talk to them. He does not speak to anyone, save on a windy afternoon weeks after he has ceased human contact, which now makes hot perspiration break through his unwilling skin. Ignoring the sweat stinging his eyes he exchanges words with Uzumaki Naruto, strange deep words of miserable fellow fury and rejected understanding.

They fight once, viciously, in a playground, rolling in sand that leaves nasty infected abrasions. Sasuke wins, like he wins everything: better grades, more popular, stronger and smarter.

Just as lonely.

Years and years later, when they have changed and it is all about them, Naruto will say: _Sasuke. I always knew that you were alone too_. Silly utterance: there are so very many lonely kids in Leaf, and no one helps – fucking miracle there aren't more traitors.

Sasuke's simply the one who made an impression, forced his way into Naruto's consciousness.

Time passes as it will, far away. It is marked, in its way, by the growing length he can throw a kunai, by the empty space left between him and the crowds. Sasuke used to be – never tactile, but he touched his family with casual normalcy. Contact makes him uncomfortable these days, body twitching away from it like his mind twitches from the redness and the shadows (drawn and repulsed, lost).

Which makes it all the stranger that he kisses Uzumaki Naruto at the not-so-tender age of twelve. Not that he has much choice in the matter, nor truly about Naruto at all.

Naruto is crouching on the desk, staring Mr. Perfect down, not quite able to convince himself that Sasuke's lack of response is due to intimidation. And ah, now the haughty rich boy is responding: staring right back, hard and sharp and deep, with those damn impenetrable eyes.

(the idiot's face is broad and stupid, strange scratches lining his cheeks)

Then he – topples forward, can't catch himself, mouth open to yell about some stupid punk shoving him.

When he was small he used to pretend he couldn't stop; ran into people intentionally, just so he could touch them. Scuffles are good too, feeling the warmth. Not as good as Iruka-sensei slinging a happy arm around his shoulders, but – nothing could have prepared him for having someone else's pulse beating against his lips.

He has a split second to notice it, heat gathering under his skin, before they disengage, and it's too much and too close and it wasn't supposed to be you, but it will seem it always is.

Alright, Naruto tells himself, spluttering. It happened, big deal. Now I just need to deal with it.

Too bad that tends to be the hard part.

He's had a lot of pretend friends through the years, though, and Denial and Repression aren't strangers to him. Real good buddies, in fact.

Minutes later, through what is clearly a cosmic conspiracy of awesome proportions and cruelty, he is told they are to join the same team.

The Bell Test, and Sasuke feels a child again for the first time since his parents left (_were taken from_) him.

His existence is lighter than it has been for years, layers of everyday minutiae blurring into mild nuances between him and the searing reds and blacks at his core. Even in Country of Wave, despite the remembered ghost-dark of _sakki_ cloying his sight, this holds true.

(maybe it is not too late. maybe this world can hold you, safe from the tsukiyomi hells)

It's a bit like that time when he dove deep, deep into the waters of the lake above which his father said he was not good enough for the Katon Gokakyu no Jutsu and Sasuke strove to prove him wrong, eventually did. The very bottom was murky and pleasantly cold. Sasuke figured he could have lived in peace there, wandering among the lost things and measuring his strength against the beasts of the deep, but eventually the difference between lungs and gills told him he did not belong here either and chased him off. After a while, feet paddling in the water and arms reaching upwards, he could see the darkened, intrusive (_oh longed for_) rays of light seeping through the mass of water.

Sasuke is scared of dying, there is no way around that. The chilling certainty of motionlessness, the redness bleeding out and becoming the world; I _know_ what a body feels like after the soul has departed, hate knowing how vulnerable everyone is to hurt, at the mercy of a world that has none to spare.

Just the madness, the rips in reality, and what lies between them.

He falls from grace.

_Hate me, hate me, and survive in an unsightly way._

Go to hell, Itachi. I'm – I don't care, anymore.

(i care too much)

He doesn't think of Itachi at all, until afterwards. Itachi doesn't exist, for this one moment, there's just Sasuke and Naruto. The sole thing Itachi could never (did not) rob him off was independent will to survive, but _I'm going to be better than that, better than you, _and Sasuke is weary of being scared.

His death has been postponed for four years, and it isn't by Itachi. It's by Naruto.

The non-world is rising around him, and he realizes the redness is beautiful, in its way, when you're past fearing it, the darkness useful. They take each other by the hand.

Kakashi stares at them, and this is the beginning and the end, but not for him. Life's a bitch and you're hers.

Everything is difficult, afterwards. I died for you; you died for me. How can people handle that?

It's easy. You can't, so you don't. You try to forget, except the memory is etched into you, pretending it's not there even as it burns through you.

It's a strange team, Kakashi is the first to acknowledge (with a customary indolent shrug). Naruto drooling over Sakura for no apparent reason, Sakura running after Sasuke with equally poor results. The snobby brat and the rude one fighting like cat and dog.

Naruto can't stop picking at it, Sasuke's like an itchy scab.

He laughs and pesters, insults and fights and saves, and there's… there's something.

A reaction, because for some imbecile reason Sasuke is equally incapable of letting it lie.

Takes him up on any challenge with a furious sort of kindly inevitability, remembered from a childhood when things still mattered, before Itachi robbed the days of their meaning.

When the gaps in reality open up, washing red shadows over him, he still sees Naruto sometimes, stares at him through the chaos and the distance and the pain. It's not that he wants to see, just that he can't seem to look away, and everything else has vanished (_naruto is_ _real)_.

Naruto sees him all the time.

At one point they have an almost civil conversation. It happens in between a fist-fight and an argument, and the world is angling slowly, spinning too fast under light feet.

Naruto is smiling, Sasuke's looking away, and something is in the process of changing or being realized. When it churns, a host twisting pulse, Naruto makes a crude exclamation and Sasuke puts his elbow in Naruto's stomach, shaking his bangs forward so no one will notice.

I'm not sure what's happening but I'm sure it's ours, only ours. Stay away, fucking outsiders who never care, don't you dare touch me.

Naruto slings arms around his neck both once and twice. Sasuke tells himself it doesn't matter.

Once, in what might be some idiot kind of dare or an even stupider attempt to show affection, Naruto puts his hand on Sasuke's arm, and it's nothing like the stupid awkward clinging he's used to from the girls he can't even be bothered to tell off. Hot scratchy palm meets chiller, softer skin and expensive fabric, and nothing is as usual anymore. The sun is heavy on his neck, Naruto's warmth throbs against the inside of his elbow, and finally there's an insult, and sheepish laughter, and Sasuke clogs him in the jaw.

_You're my best friend_, a voice in Naruto's mind speaks up. _You're the one who matters most._

Then the Chuunin Exam happens, and because Naruto apparently thinks you can keep trying out different endings until you find the one you prefer, and because apparently Naruto can make him care about this, Sasuke fights Orochimaru like a hero instead of like a survivor.

Rightly he should have died. So Kakashi tells him, but smiling, because he didn't, and there might be assumptions to be made from this.

A survivor again, and no such person can be innocent. Sasuke has long since given up trying – no, it was never among his goals, though it was with him nevertheless for long years.

"Kakashi," he says meaningfully. I have never called him sensei.

Kakashi meets his gaze over the colorful paperback edition of _Icha Icha Paradise_. The gray gaze is dry, detached, speaking one truth about the Jounin instructor. The single visible eye from which it originates is not nearly so still or uninterpretable, and initially Sasuke thought this might mean something, because no one who's that easy to read can reach Jounin level, but he has since learned it's a simple trick. Kakashi, who never lies with words, uses his eye for the purpose, widening and narrowing it to fool fools.

The alternative truth, the small part of Kakashi that has not yet completely given up, expresses itself through the mouth. A Byakugan would have been practical, but without the Hyuuga Bloodline Limit and without any means to rip the mask off, Sasuke resorted to simpler methods. He's pretty sure he can glean most of Kakashi's emotions now, having spent an afternoon making various facial expressions in front of his mirror with a piece of cloth tied across the lower half of his own face.

Kakashi nods approval, accepts training him. For days and days Sasuke runs with his teacher's eyes heavy on his body, until he's alone now at the camping site, his companion off to fetch dinner. His legs shake so wildly he can barely assert control over them; bored and humiliated he uses the nearest stone formation for leverage and forces himself to his feet.

A handful minutes later, give or take, Kakashi returns to find his charge clinging to the rock, flayed fingers inching closer to the book he must have left. Jeez, I'm getting old (translation: should have grown out of finding this funny).

"What is this shit you're always reading anyway?" Sasuke says, curiosity fighting with his aura of superior nonchalance.

Kakashi shrugs and figures Sasuke's old enough someone's going to have to enlighten him about mommies and daddies who love each other very much, and in lieu of the boy's parents Kakashi is guessing the job will fall to him. If he can get away with offering Sasuke a peek at his porn, he will.

"Why don't you see for yourself?" he shrugs, quenching a flinch at the sight of Sasuke's dirty blood-crusted fingers on the glossy front page.

His student obviously struggles with his pride before mirroring the hasty shrug and flipping open a random page.

Sasuke has suspected, on and off, that their teacher has a drinking problem. It's not surprising, really, between ANBU memories and idiot students; and the fact he's voluntarily reading this vile crap definitely proves it.

After the thirtieth re-read Kakashi could recite by heart the purple prose detailing back-breaking breasts that furrows Sasuke's brow, curves his mouth in disgust.

Unexpected, Kakashi admits, starting dinner. When Kakashi was twelve he knew intimately – no, forget that. At twelve Kakashi had long since learned the intricacies of procreation, and suddenly the knowledge started to appear interesting. Even as a child he was partial to a well-curved woman.

The Fourth took his team peeping once, in memorandum of Jiraiya of the Legendary Sannin, and Kakashi found the experience _fascinating_ – mainly because he could needle Obito about it with splendid results for months afterwards. He was dead certain that his teacher's not-so-secret ladylove was the most beautiful and desirable woman in the whole wide world.

He stole a single kiss, once she was on her lie-de-parade, though she was ugly then, strangled.

Reaching to return the paperback, Sasuke's gaze lands on a different paragraph, and train-wreck syndrome seems to compel him to skim a few words. He shouldn't have, damn it, and he practically throws the book into Kakashi's waiting hand, hurried as though it burned as badly as his blush.

Christ, Kakashi thinks. Should I laugh or cry?

At the very least he can skip the mommies section and needs no longer worry about a lecture on contraceptive. What do you know, and it would definitely serve to explain part of Sasuke's cutely and disturbingly mutual Naruto-obsessing. Kakashi's never seen the point in cutting with only one edge of your kunai, but his brat's always been a stubborn and restrictive little bastard.

Well, hell, Sasuke thinks. But it – gives him an opening.

They've all made fools of themselves in front of Kakashi so often that it hardly matters anymore.

There are many ways of looking at people, Sasuke is well aware. Looks at Kakashi now, and discovers the way his teacher's eye has of lingering on him. It could be made to become something.

I've taken chances before.

With the Sharingan eye hidden from the world Kakashi sees more than most, and it becomes increasingly apparent he's waiting for some sign to indicate that Sasuke's ready to prove his worth.

Except that's a misunderstanding. Power corrupts anything it can, and Sasuke has few defenses, scared avenger child: what Kakashi is waiting for is some sign to determine that Sasuke's so desperate and decided that Kakashi will have to give in because better he than Orochimaru.

Eventually Sasuke has considered and discarded enough strategies that time is running short. Here we go.

Carefully he schools his features into one of the soft, bright smiles Itachi was fond of. The ones he read bedtime stories for and occasionally played with Sasuke to see. It should make him sick but instead he feels a child again, small and soft and trying for the adults' attention. Deception, or it should be.

The world is large, the darkness overwhelming, and he smiles through it, face numb from the unfamiliar expression.

"I'm an Uchiha," he says softly, convinced enough to be convincing by default. "I know everything comes with a price."

Does he? Yeah, I'd think so.

Kakashi has said: _But power is never for free._

Sasuke considers. There are things in this world that he wants. Not many and never easy, but they're there and they exist. He can't give in to that; can to need. And this (he pauses, swallows, almost licks his lips before he remembers orochimaru and shudders, not entirely from revulsion) might be necessary, in strange complicated ways. Kakashi will not be moved by anger or violence or pride.

His muscles yield to his will, move smoothly even though mentally he stumbles, and there is startlingly soft hair in his fist, a screaming strain in his feet as he stands on tiptoe, never-seen lips parting over his.

Passively letting himself be pushed away long moments later, stunned, he thinks with a certain dizzy sensation stealing over him: Naruto would laugh me to scorn if I told him I've seen Kakashi unmasked.

Their teacher's face is not particularly remarkable: narrow, attractive, with only a jagged black scar crawling up his neck, spreading across the underside of his chin and sneaking towards the left corner of his mouth, to uniquely define it. The scar is broad and glistening darkly, like burn-marks or snakeskin or thick cloying oil clinging to sun-bereft skin so pallid it's surreal.

If presented with any kind of a choice Kakashi is not into little boys, he hasn't been attracted to kids since he was one himself, but Sasuke sometimes feels he is the exception to everything.

Large and rough Kakashi's hand ruffles his hair, like Naruto's blond mop seems to invite people to; a week later Sasuke masters Chidori.

The final part of the Chuunin Exam comes and goes, the skirmish with it, and things can't go back to normal. There's no way they could.

After the battle and the broken truths in The Valley at the End, there is definitely no way.

Then there is Orochimaru smelling weird and being large and gangly over him, rocking into him, and how _fucking good_ it always feels no matter how much he throws up afterwards, and _normal _is just a bad joke.

It should have been obvious, of course: Sasuke is hard and soft and hollow, unquenchable and breakable, a child of the red darkness at the core of the world, everything Orochimaru likes in a plaything or a lover or an heir or a pet or a whore.

Nevertheless, the first time Orochimaru comes for him is a shock.

Training is executed in a very different fashion in Sound, or at the very least Sasuke's is, and that's all that matters to him. Orochimaru knows a hundred thousand jutsu, genjutsu and ninjutsu and taijutsu, and he performs them one after the other, month after month, while Sasuke makes himself as comfortable as he can on the ground nearby and copies them all with his Bloodline Limit eyes.

His taijutsu goes to rust, but what does that matter when he can train it back to its former glory afterwards, and when he learns more and faster than he ever has before? Making the summoning contract with the snakes is his only break.

They are extremely large and their stench isn't pleasant, but they like him.

"You're not actually evil," they tell him. "But you're sure as hell not good. Sure, I'll serve you."

Sasuke feels that it that's all there was to it they might have told him so before he expired most of his charka and too much of his blood calling them, repressing terror and subsequently clinging to one of their heads for hours. Then again, spending a day jumping between their bodies on an adrenaline-trip to avoid being eaten is probably worthwhile exercise after all that intellectual work, and it was darkly brilliant the way intense struggle can be.

(i'd forgotten)

At last Sasuke too knows a hundred thousand jutsu. Executing them all is beyond him, but he knows their secrets, how to master and counter them, can mix them and jumble them and create new ones. They speak to him, in soft weeding whispers, mumbling genius gibberish. He grows very adept at ignoring them, drowning them in the dusky silence inside his head.

Long before this, when his body is as soft as it has ever been, Orochimaru's hands clasp his shoulders. Sasuke's muscles have worn away, leaving his bones poking sharp and unprotected under the heaviness of his alleged master's hold.

Touch and Orochimaru, in Sasuke's thankfully limited experience, do not make for a pleasant combination – the man moves like a snake, feels like one, but where a snake is cold and scratchy and firm, something Sasuke has grown to feel comradely for, Orochimaru's flesh is lukewarm and sticky-soft; dead.

"What are you doing," Sasuke says, eyes fixed firmly on the opposite wall. "Let go."

"Oh, no, Sasuke-kun," Orochimaru mumbles, voice slithering revolting and thrumming with power Sasuke does not want to admit he craves through Sasuke's ears. "Our connection is a trade-off, surely you are aware. My skills are yours, your body is mine."

While Sasuke has always presupposed Orochimaru's interest in his body to be limited to claiming it for his own shell (repression is a fine thing, and believing only what you want, oh foolish child) – well, clearly he was wrong and it's shocking and disgusting but he isn't getting away and he's sworn to those he needs avenge that he'll sacrifice anything for that purpose.

A body's just a tool. I've used myself for worse.

Orochimaru takes him up against the wall and Sasuke hates how good it feels, how careful Orochimaru is to make it pleasurable for him.

Static noise drowns through his brain, the overpowering jingle of waves crashing scattering through everything vulnerable. He vows not to react but twists nonetheless in Orochimaru's grip, a shock like panic ripping at him as a hand lifts his shirt away and stretches across his stomach. Hot, taut, and Orochimaru is standing between his legs, hard and inescapable, and it's actually happening. God, it's really happening.

Naïve still, he does not think the situation can conceivably get much worse, but the first feather-whisper brush of Orochimaru's fingers across his sex proves him very wrong. Trashing, he bites down on his lip and turns his face to the side, hiding impotent Sharingan underneath descended lids. His own breathing is loud as the screams of the dead, and he won't allow himself any living cries.

Sometimes he fights it, vicious and losing. Once in a blue moon he begs (_yes no please_).

Perhaps it's a fair price: semen for blood, and Orochimaru drags fingers heavy with chakra over him, pushing buttons, prodding nerves.

Time moves on like a large bloody river, but sometimes he feels he's been crushed into one of its beaches and climbed atop it, sits there in the grayness and watches everything pass by.

Orochimaru owns several fairly luxurious estates that most of his minions, trained to abide by the codes of caves and laboratories, do not belong in. Sasuke, who does, is comfortable and natural because he was raised in never-questioned excess, is by now immune to its lures.

_This_, he thinks slowly in one of the hundred rooms he lives in that isn't his, tentatively forming the certainty while his fingers run chakra with casual mastery over a cut on his leg. _This isn't what I need._

He has been aware for a long time: _this isn't what I want_, but that's not what matters.

The need is, and it isn't present. Orochimaru's mind in his body would not be the vengeance he seeks.

Sasuke has killed before; is not innocent anymore and knows that that is not going to work now.

He is not actually certain how many he has slain, began his murdering career without the detailed skill necessary to definitely determine who died instantly, a little later, not at all. He remembers the first, though, holding the weapon and slashing it, the warm red splash-back on his face, a stray droplet hitting his warily wide eye and turning his sight briefly crimson. I remember the heavy, almost-decapitated body slumping limp against my legs and middle, the strain in my arms as I dropped the blood-slick kunai and pushed the corpse away from me. The resisting strain of muscle and bone in the cooling neck, the clammy sensation of dead skin sticking wetly to its skull.

It meant very little to him, beyond the shock. Just another splinter in something that was already broken.

Bodily slaying a Legendary Sannin whose master technique aims for immortality is hardly an option.

Which means very little too, in the grand scheme of things, for they bring him to the temple three days later. Kabuto yammered about fine robes and costly oils, but Sasuke snorted and refused, and Orochimaru looked at him and smiled and they both knew it made no difference. Still short and angular and bony but muscled again and fast, he steps into the large man-made cave with dust from the training yard a light powder in his hair and on his clothes.

He is not impressed by it, nor by Orochimaru painting intricate calligraphy seals over his body and muttering arcane spells. A good half an hour later the Snake Master places two hands on Sasuke's brow, and this is what it comes down to. All of it, in the end, a morbid god's jutsu burning against his skin, which procedure seems merciful in an instant because then it is burning _through_ him.

Orochimaru extracts his own soul with great care, holding tight to his knowledge and chakra, slipping out of, ripping free from, the body he …inherited… from that nameless man three years ago.

This should be the same thing; it is not. In matters such as these, one crucial difference, a single mistake, signals the end.

This isn't where he'd expected to find it. He thought he'd die with Jiraiya, and Tsunade, or not at all.

Because, Sasuke thinks, as usual I am a mistake, don't work the way I am supposed to.

This is his body, his mind nailed firmly into all its quirks and bends, and, Orochimaru belatedly realizes, Sasuke has long since ceased to fear.

This is a body that utterly rejects the intrusion, controlled by a decidedly and stubbornly obsessive mind.

It is over.

He looks at Kabuto, afterwards, considers killing him, but something inside him mutters, insistently, _useful_. He refrains.

Studies the man for a moment, the near-sighted medic ninja with a past composed almost entirely of lies and the betrayal of those same untruths. What the hell are you doing here anyway, Kabuto? You don't have a home, but this isn't where most people would end up.

Only the dead desperate, he supposes, but does not like that line of thought. The dead and the desperate.

He is so full of chakra he hurts from it, the metallic thrumming owning his body up; he has to grit his teeth, used to pain though he may be. This is dangerous, if the amount was miscalculated and his body can't handle the new own power added to the old…

Oh, I'll handle it.

"Orochimaru-sama," Kabuto tries, and Sasuke snaps back to the present.

"Hn," he replies, then childishly, "Go fuck yourself."

I can't stay here. I _can't_.

A moment later, overpowering chakra and _sakki_ withdrawn inexpertly, by one who has yet to master the vastness of his power, Kabuto finds himself alone in his proclaimed master's lost stronghold. He admits he is a little faint, contemplating possible courses of action though knowing which one he will choose.

Well, it could have been worse. At least, last he heard, the Leaf leaders do not torture for information given willingly, and seeing their reactions promises a good deal of amusement (i have nowhere else to go, truly). Torture for the sake of torture is a favorite pastime of his, but he does not think the baby-doll hag is that far gone yet (he is wrong).

xxxxxxxxxx


	3. Excercises in What Might Have Been

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 03:**

"**Exercises in What Might Have Been "**

It is a day in his kitchen (it never happens: it is an exercise in maybes, in what-ifs, in could-have-beens. it's an obscure branch on the tree of reality, a trivial twig that truth never climbed).

Naruto is damn fucking tired of what-ifs, he bloody well _pukes_ (on) might-have-beens.

He's not an abstract person, at heart, and he's had nothing but maybes for one thousand and ninety-eight days now (he's had nothing for one thousand and ninety-eight days now). Were he forced to eat only that for so long, he might even tire of ramen, and that he at least liked to begin with.

In a reality of meaningless (_fucking meaningless_, and he wants to hurt someone_sasukehimself_) frustration, daydreams and nightmares are all he has, and they're too insubstantial to nourish.

To matter.

He realizes this anew every morning; today he just lacks the energy to push it down below blind (_stupid_) belief. He stares at the smoke drifting from his tea, feeling anything, _anything_, but unquenchable.

If only he had been a little faster, a little smarter – if only he had gotten close enough to know Sasuke would leave, which he didn't because he doesn't have Sakura-chan's logic, can't puzzle out stuff like that, or any stuff really. And he did not want to believe the(ir) commitment was so one-sided Sasuke would leave (it, him, them, everything, _leave_) but (but!) if he had realized he could have fixed it, would have known the words (the punches, the clinging), known them as his eyes know the sky is blue (as his heart pumps blood, as kyuubi knows the wilderness).

It lies uncomfortable and untouched, mutually acknowledged through the silence between him and Sakura-chan, that knowledge. He didn't know what was happening; she didn't know what to do about it.

The tea has stopped blowing smoke into the humid air, must be getting cold.

This is when Naruto gives up.

Then through the smoke lingering gray before him, the image perceived as glazed because he has forgotten how to blink, there comes a wind.

The door is slammed open, Sakura-chan standing panting and bright in its wake.

Naruto doesn't move, can't move. Not when he's realized, is trapped in a new horrible reality framed by the realization, that he's given up. I don't think Sasuke is coming back, anymore.

"They know where he is," Sakura-chan breathes from a hundred thousand miles of distance. "Naruto, you can find him. They've located Sasuke!"

Sakura knows _shit_ doesn't even begin to describe it when she finds Naruto slumped over his kitchen table, limbs shaking as though only barely having the power to hold together, just like that time when they were outside Sasuke's home, years ago, and he simply collapsed. Sat like the broken lost child he hasn't been for years, eyes dark like a house with no one inside to turn on the light. For a moment she was so scared she thought she was going to be actually, physically ill.

Then Naruto sucker-punched the ground and growled, and he was Naruto and he had never even understood the concept of giving up, and she wanted to tell him, _I love you_. Couldn't, though.

She has come to bring him certain tidings now because she knows (a child who's been burned knows to fear the fire) that he's the only one who matters, in this case, and after the fiasco last time she isn't going to tell him to wait for backup or instructions. She'll see him off with the brightest smile she can manage. After she's told him what he needs to know she'll try her hand once more at what she ought to be spectacularly good at by now because, gallingly, it's really all she's ever managed to do: I will wait, princess in the tower, be my knight and return my dragon.

So she opens her mouth and starts talking about Kabuto, about overhearing a questioning she was not supposed to. Perchance Tsunade-sama allowed her to, perhaps she did not.

Kabuto wandered into Leaf territory early this morning and was predictably apprehended. Less than predictable was the fact he claimed he came in peace, bring me to your leader.

They did, and he said: "No need to lay hand upon me, Madam, I merely have some information I wish to share with you.

Nine days ago Orochimaru-sama performed his master jutsu on Uchiha Sasuke. However, some small complications arose.

What, you ask? Isn't it obvious? That's not Orochimaru-sama walking around in Sasuke's body, that's Sasuke – only… improved.

Oh, not that changed. His calm mask is less of a mask, I assume he can kill and fuck freely now. Might rather like both, actually.

Well, it stands to reason he will be heading for his brother.

Yes, I can point you in the right direction."

While the new broken reality in which belief has faded dead and silent is shattered, the old one isn't whole either – stuck in a strange vacuum Naruto gets to his feet, follows her slowly as she turns and runs, her laughter like a trace of joy. He picks up speed as he goes, faster and faster, his every step a lightning stab of pain up his legs. He doesn't think he's ever moved this fast before, not even when Kyuubi took his body as its vessel there on the water in The Valley at the End – sound is muddled, sight too blurs (there's just sasuke. i can _smell_ him).

Out of the house and the village, through the forest and the flat landscape beyond. He'd gladly release Kyuubi if it meant he could go faster.

Meanwhile Uchiha Itachi and Hoshigaki Kisame from the Hidden Villages of Leaf and Mist are walking leisurely up a hill. Kisame sighs, bored, almost crashes into his companion's back when Itachi stops mid-step.

Following his companion's look Kisame sees it too: a slender dark-haired figure in some kind of blue ensemble, walking across a nearby hill, high on chakra. Skillfully cloaked, Kisame'll give the stranger that, but there's no way in hell to hide that amount from a member of the Akatsuki.

"Wait for me here," Itachi says. "Do not interfere. That is an absolute order, Kisame."

And really, that makes him curious enough to obey. He'll wait and see how Itachi plays this one on his own, pry for the details later. Itachi will give them to him, if only because Itachi is an efficient person, and giving Kisame what Kisame wants is the easiest way by far to get rid of him.

He sits down and starts polishing his sword while Itachi walks away and disappears from sight on the far side of the hill.

Sasuke is standing very still when Itachi approaches, mouth curving automatically in the malicious smile of a deceptive predator.

_Not prey._

He stares at his brother through the red shadows of hell, the ones Itachi ripped the world open to show him.

There is something he must do. The killing and the other thing, the one he would never have thought to attempt before the failed merging.

Right and wrong have ceased to matter.

Uchiha Itachi is a Bloodline genius of the kind that is born once in a thousand years; the means by which to kill him has to be something so stupidly simple.

Sasuke is ready to do it now, ready and willing (_i have to_), prepared and feverish and calculated (cold hot cold cold cold), and a day earlier he back-flashed, half sleeping, on a ridiculous mission way back in Leaf, when he and Naruto and Sakura were trying to have a childhood together.

(naruto giving a grin that seems to broad to fit on his face while haughtily announcing he has the perfect jutsu for this, and by the way any, situation, and promptly pronouncing what might well be the most feared phrase in leaf: "_oiroke no jutsu_!"

the sudden belated, chilling realization that the sight does nothing for him.

seeing as sasuke does not like people and is loath being close to them, he does not find this a grave problem on a personal level; so what if he likes girls or boys or sheep, since he isn't planning on ever indulging.

except restoring the clan will probably be rather difficult if he can't bring himself to sleep with some woman, and fuck you, uzumaki naruto)

A remembrance so far away it seems surreal, a colorful fictional montage, not half so stupid as it should have been. It gives birth to the embryo of a plan.

Which is why he is standing here now, smiling at Itachi through a distorting veil of adrenaline and cheated fury, swept in the darkness from between the world's layers, the ones Itachi opened for me.

Itachi's initial reaction is surprise: there's something wrong with the way Sasuke walks.

When his little brother moves, shoulders back and head up, talking half a step so they face each other squarely, the pieces start forming patterns in Itachi's mind.

Typically females execute walking by swishing their hips, males by rocking their shoulders. Both versions are subtle, smooth, subconscious: you don't notice them until they stop matching up.

Like they do in Sasuke's case now, only Itachi cannot immediately say why because Sasuke moves the way he always has moved, upper body turning minutely from side to side.

…upper body moving the way it always has moved, it dawns on Itachi another moment later, just – not _looking_ the way it always has (or, in fact, _being_ the way it always has).

It can't be, can it?

To be sure and because he correctly figures Sasuke will be too startled to stop him, his hand snaps out and lands right on Sasuke's chest.

Why yes, it seems it can be – the collarbone below his index fingertip is too frail, the ribs pressing against his wrist too thin, and his palm curves over the softness of a breast. Modest and firm though it might be, it's undeniably there and undeniably female.

"Little brother," he says, because this is so far beyond foolish it borders on the kind of genius that walks hand in hand with madness (itachi is quite knowledgeable regarding that).

_Hate me, hate me, and survive in an unsightly way._

It appears Sasuke has taken his advice to heart at last.

This last piece of it all, the last unblemished Uchiha, the lost one person that Itachi could have loved, the only one who's ever been real to him, twisted now and soiled and bitter, but still Sasuke, in the end.

Sasuke stares up at him through his bangs, licks at his lips. With a mother such as theirs (_don't like your lips, it's vulgar and shameful, a gesture for tramps and harlots_) Itachi is well aware it is not a movement Sasuke would ever think to execute; must be Orochimaru's influence. Much like this entire situation, because my boy was never this devious or shameless; never quite this practical or ruthless.

Slowly Itachi remembers his hand is still cupped over Sasuke's breast, palm arching across its nipple.

It is an interesting idea to mark Sasuke in this way, to dirty him so utterly, to oblige the wish that must have brought the child here. To enjoy what it dawns on me I might have wanted, before.

Certain that he shall be able to avoid any potential attack before it is even begun, he bends the little bit that's necessary to lay his face against Sasuke's neck. The curse seal that blemished its other side has vanished, leaving in its place twin oil-colored, sharply defined marks: remnants of a serpent's bite.

He whispers into Sasuke's ear, thinks about the need for balance and places a similar tooth-mark on this side of the sickly-pallid throat.

Unlike Kisame who bites for the raw predator pleasure, Itachi has always appreciated the aesthetic, the sophisticated and philosophical; these are the values he looks for in life, cloaked thought they may oft be in crude violence. Nevertheless, the skin he bites is coarse, as such things go, worn by sun and wind, and he could say he likes it, insofar as he likes anything. Which isn't much, but significant.

With calculated urgency to get everything over and done with before he can choke on his own panic, before the redness takes him utterly, Sasuke presses himself against Itachi's body, feels the soft curves he is not used to having smooth out against the other's harder form. His heart is beating hard and fast enough to hurt. His mouth is dry. His hands do not tremble.

This is, in essence, a very backward plan. A stab in the back, a kick in the balls, in every meaning of the phrases.

Because it is true that measured in pure skill he does not compare, no one compares, and it will be impossible to revive a clan without heterosexual intimacy yet he can't bring himself to sleep with a woman, and females can fake, and when are all men distracted?

It's nothing I haven't done before. _A ninja's body is a tool._

(and at age thriteen itachi became the best that he can ever be; there can be nothing left for him to cling to life for, nothing to prevent a chance or a risk, nothing to stop him indulging any potential diversion)

The thrusts are different than Orochimaru's were, shorter and sharper. Itachi's bony pelvis cuts into his hips and thighs, Itachi's sex scrapes him raw inside. Sasuke ignores the panting and the aches, stares into the Naruto-blue sky and measures the time, the pulse pounding into him and the rhythm of the movement above him.

Cautious by default, trained to constantly deceive, Itachi clenches his eyes shut and spasms a second before familiar liquid warmth invades Sasuke's womb. Knowing well what to look for after Orochimaru, Sasuke is not fooled, waits until the optimal moment. He has embraced his brother almost from the start, hands clutching at the back of Itachi's neck. Steady practice and natural talent means it takes him a fraction of an instant to form a blade of chakra between waiting fingers, force it down with all the strength and hatred and confused fury in him.

He sits up slowly, clothes pooling around him and Itachi bleeding warmth over him, slumped silently across him.

Looking at the situation as though from a great distance he remembers not to take any chances and sends a Chidori through the dead chest, feels the slimy gore as he literally crushes the lightning-burned heart between numb fingers (reaching into the red hell).

Itachi is dead.

I killed him.

Still moving his body as though it were a puppet, something foreign he has temporarily taken charge of, he pushes his brother off of him (_out of me_), almost scared to touch the soulless flesh. But he knows what is required, knows the cost of flight is always too high. Reforming the chakra blade he cuts with clumsy haste through Itachi's neck, swallows hysteria as the spine gives him momentary trouble. Swish, swoosh, and the eyes are gone, bleeding down Itachi's cheeks. The head, dropped from numb hands, rolls away like one of the balls children kick around in play, coming to rest against his ankle.

_I am not going to scream._

Instead he procures the sack he brought with him for this exact purpose from within the folds of his clothing, takes the head between wildly shaking fingers, watching it for an eternal second where it hangs suspended in the air, held by his starkly white hands. Blood streams from the stump of its neck, trickling down on Sasuke's legs like fat red teardrops. Swallowing, blinking repeatedly, he hurries to drop it into the sack, then collapses.

It is all over.

This is when Kisame, grown weary of killing Leaf ANBU, decides to tempt fortune by finding Itachi.

This, too, is when Uzumaki Naruto arrives to reclaim his precious person.

He ran for hours after he left the village gates behind, came upon the mangled bodies and shredded black cloaks, the broken masks: these must be the ANBU squad sent to retrieve Sasuke.

He's close, then. That's good.

Less good is the horrible sight of sundered bodies and the knowledge this means Sasuke might be in danger too.

He rushes to the crest of the hill, looks down into the slope below and – sees Sasuke. The same small pale shady figure, unmistakable as always he has been. Familiar enough Naruto doesn't pay so much attention to the …is it a body?... lying beside him, because, because…

Crying during emotionally loaded moments is one of those things Naruto always does and that everyone always teases him for. This time he wouldn't have been ashamed to, but he doesn't cry.

He just looks at Sasuke, smiles a little, and Sasuke has never been gone, none of it has ever happened. They've backtracked, erased all the missing time, and the Chuunin Exam just ended, Sasuke is fresh out of the hospital and their Hidden Village of Leaf is busily being rebuilt.

Just like how they coped with everything that went down in the Country of Wave, how they woke up the next morning, when Haku and Zabuza were dead, and everything was normal and sun-bright. Sasuke had never died for him, and Kakashi-sensei had never almost lost, and had never killed a boy with practiced ease. What they acknowledged remembrance of were Sasuke's red eyes and Naruto's name on the bridge, tangible cool stuff that didn't contain the possibility of altering reality forever.

Sasuke never died for him and Sasuke never killed him and Naruto has never loved him.

He stops there, on the hill among the carnage.

Because obviously Sasuke did die for him and did kill him, and love him Naruto does. Wishes so it hurts he could have offered Sasuke something – something Naruto isn't precisely certain how to define, some obscure elusive necessary epiphany he knows he's been through but can't put words on, something like what he gave to Neji and Gaara, only apparently he wasn't good enough for Sasuke and god, that tears at him.

And not only because Sasuke is the only one who's ever been right or enough for him.

He stands there in silence and takes in the sight of his everything and tries to somehow sort out what it means and what it should be and how it feels when he notices a familiar fishy male in the exceptionally gay Akatsuki robe coming for the Uchiha.

"Sasuke!" he screams, practically throwing himself down the hillside because there is no way in hell he'll let anyone else beat the living shit out of his loved ones.

There is no time for him to do anything.

Sasuke looks up the moment before Naruto screams, fixes his eyes on the approaching Kisame. Naruto watches in unaccustomed but somehow unbreakable quiet as Sasuke closes regular Sharingan eyes and blinks them open changed, with their irises switched into the arrangement Naruto recognizes as that of the Mangekyou Sharingan.

"Tsukiyomi," Sasuke says, because Orochimaru's theoretical knowledge and the Uchiha Bloodline Limit's organic awareness combine nicely into perfect execution of the jutsu, hurriedly dragging his clothes back on as much as possible because for some unfathomable stupid reason Naruto's presence makes propriety an issue.

Naruto's gaze transfers itself from the fallen and incapacitated shark-man to his former teammate. Sasuke's gaze is on him as well now, black as an old bruise, and Naruto catches himself thinking: Is this you? How much of it is you?

It sure as hell looks like Sasuke, at least. Shaky and with ripped clothes, and Naruto is distantly surprised that at fifteen the Uchiha seems even more fine-boned than he was at twelve, but yeah, there's no mistaking it. This is Sasuke.

Looking closer, Naruto discovers two things. The first is that though there are small scars on both sides of the Uchiha's neck, the curse seal is gone.

The second is that a decapitated body that looks very much like it is probably Itachi's is still on the ground at Sasuke's feet.

"You did it," he says, touched into numbness, without which he feels he would be left too raw to hold together. _You freed yourself. _

(_i love you_)

(the words are just there, a sharp bittersweet shock in his closed mouth)

Sasuke nods slowly, and certainly it's no surprise he's in shock, though it is unnerving to see him this unsteady on his feet, his eyes so distant and dull.

"Naruto." It's all he can say.

Never mind, he might as well take the time to check whether his plan succeeded. He's still shaking.

It appears it did work, because he is starkly incapable of undying the Oiroke no Jutsu. This is normally an exceptionally simple task, a matter of loosening your hold the chakra, of allowing it to return to its original dormant shape. He tries and tries and nothing happens, exactly like he hoped and planned, and he feels a little like he might puke with panic.

"Welcome home," Naruto says. A few long seconds of silence. "I'll fucking kill you if you don't come with me."

And Sasuke is not used to being powerful but well versed in being hunted and under threat, and he has only fulfilled one half of the promise he made to his dead ones, though the second part is growing in him.

"I can't die yet," he protests, weakly in that way that Naruto makes him.

Absurd though the utterance is, Naruto has to admit he's somewhat gratified Sasuke evidently perceives him as an equal: why else would he worry? Nevertheless he has said, "I could never kill you," before he has stopped to think. Perhaps it isn't very smart of him to tell dangerous truths so blatantly, but they're not enemies anymore (_are we?_) and anyway, if he can only win by lying he'd rather lose.

"He could," Sasuke says, and beyond his own shoulder Naruto sees Kakashi-sensei sauntering towards them, Pakkun slung over one thinning shoulder. He looks a scarecrow, Naruto reflects, as though seeing him for the first time in a long while. Perhaps meeting Sasuke again has given him perspective, clarified to him what exactly they have done to his teacher, those tendencies Naruto knew of but hardly ever mentioned, eating too little and drinking too much and sleeping only on all the wrong occasions. Even all these years later, growth permanently hampered by young malnutrition, Naruto only barely reaches the Jounin to the chin, but he'll bet he weighs more.

"No he couldn't," he tells Sasuke. "I wouldn't let him. No one touches you without going through me first."

It's the closest he's ever come to telling anyone, _You're mine._

"Ah," says Sasuke, and faints.

Naruto stumbles forward to catch him.

"Hey," Kakashi-sensei says right behind him, so close the meek body warmth feels almost like a touch. "If I set about killing him there'd be about nothing you could do to alter the outcome."

Deciding that since Sasuke can't hold on and might be hurt to boot Naruto had best carry him bridal style, he adjusts his hold and turns a weary grin on Kakashi-sensei. "I know you couldn't kill him." Dried sweat slicks a bit of hair to Sasuke's forehead, and dark splotches of what smells like blood are plentiful on his arms and chest and legs, but Naruto assumes that most of it must be Itachi's. "C'mon, Kakashi-sensei, just because you forget what happens when you've been deep in the sake – it doesn't mean the rest of us do."

Kakashi reflects that a real teacher probably would not have the kind of alcohol problem that causes him to be drunk in front of his students. Probably. "What did I say to make you draw that particular conclusion?" He can't decide if his voice is laced with cold curiosity or cold fear or simply the cold that comes from substituting cooked food with cigarettes.

"Let's say you made it pretty clear you wouldn't kill your team." Naruto pauses, watchful and empathic. "Again." A moment more of quiet, flavored by sympathy rather than apprehension. "Who's Obito?"

"The first," Kakashi says with some difficulty, because what he told Sasuke will mean less if Naruto knows as well, that will make it information instead of a confidence. He can't bring himself to say more, because this is loud bright daylight Naruto, a world away from the weight of a dark head on his body, low words in the night, lethargic exchanges of memory that seemed unstoppable. Weren't, of course, but seemed to be, and often that is enough.

"The first person you killed?" Naruto wants him to clarify. It's almost as brave as nosy of him, this attempt to understand and offer aid, because Kakashi catches the wince of remembrance: a hand through a chest, blood on forest grass, eyes a breaking sky.

"The first I let die," he replies, and wonders if that's any different from Naruto's rejected suggestion. He sighs, shrugs, moves to bend over Kisame's convulsing form. Lost to the world, this one. Kakashi produces a blade. "You go on ahead. I'll take care of matters here."

After barely a second's hesitation Naruto nods sharply and is off: plainly he understands at least a modicum of what Kakashi opts to do, feels wrong to leave him to it, but Sasuke is warm and unconscious and immediate in his arms, breathing soft sighs against his throat, small puffs of warmed Sasuke-spiced air.

Kakashi feels he needs a little time at a distance before he is ready to deal with that immediacy himself. He watches his student run until Naruto is no more than a garish spot against the horizon, Sasuke a lingering shadow in his arms, then sighs again and raises a comradely ironic eyebrow at the twisting shark-man. There is foam at the corners of his mouth, now. Is this what I looked like, when the man Sasuke slew used the ultimate Bloodline Limit on me?

Huh. Better not have been. Rabid terror isn't a good look on me.

He carves Kisame's head off with the effortless efficiency of muscles long schooled in a comprehensive task, grabs the wetly red sack Sasuke must have brought and drops the blue head onto the one already severed and packaged. The burden is arranged over his shoulder, a morbid sack of gifts bumping against his back in rhythm with his steps.

He goes to Tsunade, because he is sensible enough to know Naruto isn't.

"Well, well, well," she says a little later, amusement lying thick as powder over the initial surprise painted across her broad face. The sort of amusement that stems from having spent her adolescence training and fighting with Jiraiya – the amusement of someone who's learned to laugh every time she really wants to cry. "And he has the Mangekyou, you say?" she confirmation-asks, eyebrows drawn wearily together in that way that means this is trouble.

Kakashi nods. "Could use it, too. Or the Tsukiyomi at least."

They both know he killed Kisame; which fact leads inevitably to the deduction he must have killed Itachi as well, in order to have attained the accursed Bloodline Limit power that cannot be defied – having been so involved with the Uchiha, Kakashi could not have avoided knowledge of their Sharingan or its specifications. Didn't even want to avoid it, once upon a time.

_To achieve the Mangekyou Sharingan, the ultimate Bloodline Limit, the one that none can withstand, you must slay your best friend._

Made from an old language that no one truly knows these days, it's a sketchy translation, parts of which make little sense to the critical mind.

How is a Bloodline Limit, which possesses no consciousness, supposed to know that someone has fulfilled the criteria for attaining it?

What defines a "best friend"? Undeniably the definition varies from individual to individual, but how far can you stray from the perceived norm without failing? If your dearest is a pet, does that count? Can your spouse also be your best friend, or is that an altogether different kind of love? And what if one Uchiha's best friend is a person he cares about approximately as much as he cares for his favorite pair of shoes whereas the other Uchiha loves his best in all the world?

Another possible translation that's been suggested is: _In order to achieve the Mangekyou Sharingan, the master technique which conquers all, you must destroy that which you hold most precious in the world. _

Better, but still not right, not without openings for argumentation.

Not so long ago, mere weeks, Kakashi came upon the truth of it and shared it after some doubt with his Hokage: "It's really much simpler than that, than we could ever have thought. Those Uchiha liked to paint it out in mystic shades, but it comes down to what curses usually come down to – blood and sacrifice."

_To achieve the Mangekyou Sharingan you need spill the life blood of an Uchiha or of one loved by an Uchiha._

Which means it's kind of too bad Sasuke offed Itachi already, since three years is a long time, and Kakashi is no longer certain he could kill either Sasuke or Naruto, not absolutely convinced. It seems stupid to sacrifice Sakura for the off chance Sasuke might love her, especially since it'll ruin him utterly if he's wrong.

Maybe even if he's right.

Tsunade looks at him and knows he is already shattered, scattered, shit. Kakashi the Copy Ninja, the Fourth's prize pupil who made Chuunin at six, White Fang's son.

She's always preferred Naruto, but she is well aware that such blinding direct light will be unbearable and garish to others. The sun is necessary for life, but the moon's what's loved.

Customarily reluctant to waste the energy required for a bow, Kakashi nods, grins naked pain and rests his shoulder-blades against the wall. He might have looked relaxed, head thrown back and hands in his pockets, if not for the obvious fact he's only doing that to spare himself the revelation of an exposed eye and to hide the shaking of his fingers.

It's wise of him, she thinks, because a coward recognizes its own.

"Ah," he says, as if just remembering, glancing at her out of the corner of a reddened eye. "Itachi's cock was out when I pushed him over to torch him at the same time as Kisame."

"Oh," says Tsunade, and is faintly disgusted she is not surprised. "Clarify."

Kakashi shrugs. "I saw his clothes had been opened, his sex was laid bare. Looked used. Blood on it, and I don't think it was his."

"I never knew," she says, distanced. "To think he was so obsessed – it thought it was only Sasuke who could see naught beside his brother."

"Yeah well," Kakashi mutters, languid and cynical. "The kid's delectable, it's hard to avoid."

"Yes," Tsunade says, cold-steely suddenly because what an S-Class felon does is one thing, what her trusted Jounin underlings get up to another matter entirely. "It was made clear to me you think so."

"I didn't mean–" And before he took to drinking he would never have let his discomfort shine through all the cracks in his masks, all the cracks in what lies beneath, ugly and forgotten at the core.

"Well I did. Honestly, Kakashi. I have all the medical records, I know who patched him up afterwards, and I know who he ran into during that training. It was you or Gaara, and I think that only leaves us with one option as though who fucked him up enough someone had to make sure he could walk before the Chuunin Exam Final Matches three years ago."

"Yeah, well," Kakashi says again, eyes closed and grinning pain at the ceiling, fingers twitching close to his kunai with bare-faced cheek. "Shit happens."

xxxxxxxxxx


	4. Stand By Me

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 04:**

"**Stand By Me"**

Sakura meets Naruto and his burden outside the village, because she knows intellectually that life experience is a heavy burden, that Tsunade-sama has grown hard and remorseless under its weight. Because she knows everything about herself is calculated, and nothing about Naruto is.

(he can't learn how not to believe in happy endings)

She loves him for it, and it's brave and wonderful and makes him strong, but it also makes him weak; and I do not consider him wise on account of it.

"Hiya," Naruto says, so far removed from her by the presence of the person in his arms that he is apparently at a loss for words, resorts to a greeting. Even when his eyes flick briefly to her face, she can tell he's only looking at Sasuke.

She finds it strange she does not do the same, not with that automatic force compelling Naruto. Now she turns her attention to his unconscious burden, however, and for a second she feels twelve again, twelve and innocent and helpless, faced with so much death she couldn't handle and a life that she wasn't sure how to deal with either.

(_it was child's love, naruto. i'm not a child anymore. he'll always be our darling, but i – he isn't for me_)

"Did you do that?" she asks. Because she has seen Naruto furious, and heard whispers of evil chakra leaking out of him, of red stares from blue eyes.

Still, this is starkly unexpected: Sasuke looking more dead than alive, his forehead wrinkled unpleasantly even in sleep. Even from a meter away she smells the sweat and blood on him, registers ripped clothes and too much bone and muscle with too little flesh to soften them underneath the too pale skin in the gaps.

He looks very small. Precocious, might be the word she's searching for, except there is nothing childish about his too-fine, too-delicate features. He does not look a boy of fifteen – one of five, perhaps, or a girl.

"Itachi," Naruto answers, furious for a moment she dares suggest he would ever hurt Sasuke, before he remembers The Valley at the End, when they tore each other apart.

(am i gratified she thinks i'm capable?)

Catty green eyes, pale and watchful, widen in fear, but there's determination around the mouth, in the fisted hands. "We'll take him down."

"Sasuke already did. I reckon Kakashi-sensei will bring the body back with him."

"That's–" The automatic phrase, _that's a relief_ – she wants to say it, oh how she wants to, but she remembers the Forest of Death and the curse seal bestowed there. Effective Sasuke seems to mean evil Sasuke, much of the time. "Is that so. Um, let's take him to my house, I'll probably be able to patch him up so he can face Tsunade-sama on his own two feet. Why don't you make a few clones and we'll work from there."

Team Seven sneak past the village gates shrouded in Sakura's genjutsu, run as hell as fast as they're through, leaving the transformed replications to keep the guards busy and distracted. Probably they'll think it a practical joke, those are common enough with Naruto.

Naruto has never been to Sakura-chan's house before, and perhaps they should have brought Sasuke to his place instead because there's no one else there, but on the other hand the neighbors tend to complain, even after all these years, whenever he so much as breathes too loudly, and the amount of junk assembled there probably is not conductive to a healing environment.

(my heart is trying to pound its way out of my chest)

Sakura thinks: I can do this.

She's hurrying through the village with Naruto in tow, heading for her home, because she knows it's the only thing she can do. And alright, maybe there's a bit of childish revenge mixed into all the relentless logic and care and worry, because putting Sasuke (who abandoned me) in her bed and nursing him, having him dependent and in gratitude, subjected to her family, is a suggestion more thrilling than sickening.

Sakura isn't going to argue with herself about it. Not when she can't forgive as readily as Naruto, for whom apparently the time without Sasuke never happened, not when she'd quite like to get back at him for all those months, those _years_, of constant anxiety and missing.

She loves him but she's starting to suspect she' never really been in love with him, not with all these maternal overtones thrown into the jumble of straining feeling; and you always hurt the ones you love, and being pestered and humiliated for a bit is the least Sasuke deserves.

(and petty, childish thoughts are all her head can hold, because her heart is overflowing, is washed over and drowned and breaking in new ways even as it tries to mend itself)

She doesn't deserve imminent humiliation, though, and because of that she hopes to heaven her parents aren't home.

Hoping isn't ever going to work out, she should've learned that long since. She _hoped_ she'd win Sasuke's heart, she _hoped _she'd beat Ino, she _hoped_ her parents would one day understand her choice of profession. It's all but a given none of it ever happened, isn't it? She's a big girl, now. Reality is her next stop.

"Sakura, honey?" her mother calls from the kitchen when she opens the door; ninja though she may call herself, ninja though she may actually be by now, Sakura has yet to figure out a way to do this without the little bell attached to the inside handle chiming. "You're home early."

Then her mother actually steps out into the hallway and sees them, stops short, her eyes traveling up and down Naruto and his burden.

"Um, I'm, er, sorry to, uh, disturb," he says with a sheepish faked laugh, and Sakura is forcibly reminded that of course Naruto has never been to a friend's house before.

Her parents aren't ninja, could never comprehend the concept or the appeal of it, but even middle class like them, the normal average muddled-ness that Sakura denied and turned away from in pursuit of something grander, even they must have heard of the Uchiha, the greatness and the fall and the sole survivor. This knowledge notwithstanding, Sakura remains uncertain as though whether her mother would have recognized Sasuke for whom he is even decked up in the ceremonial outfit of his clan, much less in these circumstances.

Instead she sees a friend of Sakura's from the foreign world of death and glory, and stares.

It dawns on Sakura, catching a glimpse of them in the mirror, that she was wrong before; that Sasuke doesn't look like a girl at all. While too small to seem a man, shorter probably than she, he looks decidedly adult now: dark and dangerous and cold as always, and held like this in Naruto's arms, he looks a …a woman.

A woman of the kind who'd have nothing to do with Sakura, who'd drink imported alcohol and smoke expensive cigarettes in the company of powerful men opting to fight for and over her.

"Is this a, a school-mate of yours, Sakura?" her mother asks, tone wavering watchfully.

"Actually, yes," Sakura admits, refusing to glance at her two most precious people. "These are my teammates. Er. And this, obviously, would be my mother."

"Hi," Naruto says awkwardly, giving her the distinct impression he would scratch the back of his head if Sasuke's weight had not hindered him.

Her mother nods quietly, and Sakura breaks and excuses them, hurries up the stairs with Naruto in tow (_if sasuke dies because we were too slow exchanging pleasantries…!)._

Naruto has never been in her room before, and does not seem overly interested now he is.

(it does remind him, abstractedly, of a dream he had once. in which sakura-chan smiles love at him and invites him, holds him and kisses him, a single perfectly imperfect time, and it is all so horribly wrong: he has her backed up against a convenient wall, realizes dumbly that he's still a little shorter than she – and that he's about as wanted as he's been all those other times, when friends and parents and lovers took hold of each other's hands and walked away from him.

"it's not worth it," he discovers, meeting her filthy green stare. she is far too special to him, long ago when his silly crush began and in a different manner now: she's one of his precious people, and hell, he'll bloody murder anyone who even thinks of forcing himself on her.

"shut up," she mutters, but mildly, kindly, in that way she has when he has surprised her and she thinks maybe he isn't so bad. "it's just a kiss."

her hands firm in his hair, her chin knocks into his as she tilts her head decisively backwards: naruto muffles a squeak against her mouth and fists a hand around her hip to keep his balance.

she is slender and pretty and what he fantasized about for years in his arms, and I don't _know_ her and I don't _want_ her, and I'm afraid to break her, somehow.

he also has no idea what to do with the situation, opens his mouth tentatively but only feels a greater fool because he doesn't know what to do with that either. everything is so mundane and measured about sakura-chan, while naruto has shared a soul with kyuubi for far too long to be anything but a creature of instinct, and there is no fierce drive in him to have anything to do with sakura-chan's body flush against his. with sakura-chan at all. a liking there is, and traces of desire, but no fierce drive.

it isn't – isn't bad, but it isn't any more than that, either, nothing more than not-bad. leaves him with the leaden incurable weight of knowledge that sakura-chan is a concept he loves from a distance.

…probably the entire terrible occurrence is kakashi-sensei's fault. at least it is in the dream, and oh how that doesn't surprise him)

It's distant now, distant as everything save the limp warmth pressed to his chest.

"Put him on the bed," Sakura-chan instructs. "I don't think he's seriously hurt. But be prepared to run for Tsunade-sama just in case, alright?"

"Hmm?"

She gives him a hard, breaking look. "Put him down on the bed. I'll do what I can." She shakes her head, a fast movement against the confusion edging into pain. "We'd better save Tsunade-sama as a last resort. You know, well at least you _ought to_ know, certain people might be – inclined to hurt him."

"What!" Naruto exclaims, but it isn't the right word. Stealing a glance at Sakura-chan's face, open and tired and serious (knowing he'd kill for her, knowing he'd die for her, and that still that means nothing compared to sasuke deadly and in his arms) he curses the fact he's apparently the only one still clinging to a world in which adults don't lie.

"Just let me have a look. Lay him here."

With the memory of something else so close, Naruto's arms feel the resumed emptiness as a bone-deep bleakness. He can't look away but has to, because there is so much between them, the hatred and the love, the kept promises and the broken ones, and this isn't right, to look at Sasuke's crankily vulnerable face, relaxed into worry-lines.

With the deft impersonal hands of one trained in healing (shaking and lingering and slipping and burning like those of a friend examining a lost loved one) Sakura starts stripping away the blood-crusted blue fabric wrapped around Sasuke. She's never seen more of his naked skin than she does now, and that too is painted over with browning blood.

_Oh god_. Then again she has reluctantly realized that it's exceptionally rare for anything to turn out according to your expectations. Even so, bending over Sasuke, who's lying half-naked on her bed in the finer suburbs of Leaf after three years' absence and lethal glory, probably constitutes a peak, a record of strangeness rivaled only by, say, her first kiss.

(which didn't go according to plan either, all those years ago when it happened. forced its sweet way into her life.

she'd planned for it to be with sasuke-kun in romantic light, surrounded by shared warmth.

it really, really wasn't)

It's been long since she thought about that, and the idea has never felt more distant than it does now, with Sasuke's breathing only a thin layer of skin away from her probing fingers.

(her first kiss, though she refused to label it as such at the time, took place in a field of flowers with the sun blinding and brilliant in her eyes and a thin blond girl atop her.

by mutual consent they decided it didn't mean anything, wasn't real. they were very young, still caught in the doctrine that female sexuality cannot exist without a male counterpart)

Lately she's started to think Ino's hands in her hair and Ino's weight on her body, Ino's mouth on hers, were a good deal more real than their insubstantial and equally mutual crush on Sasuke.

Years away from that, from Ino and the sunflowers and from dreams of Sasuke as her boyfriend, with Sasuke's blood on her sheets, she registers, with belated suddenness, what she is actually touching.

"Naruto," she says in a very calm and mature voice, touching his elbow lightly. "Take a look at this, alright? Tell me if I'm crazy."

Naruto looks then, breaks willfully and finally looks, and his eyes are staging a rebellion against confinement in their sockets, for suddenly it makes all the sense in the world that Sasuke was smaller and lighter and prettier than Naruto's memories can readily account for.

Unfortunately that's the only thing that makes any stray bit of sense anymore.

"Why," he starts, with a tendency towards hyperventilation. "Um, correct me if I'm wrong but aren't those – how come Sasuke has, holy shit, breasts? I mean, are they _real_?"

"I," Sakura says dumbly. "I don't know."

"Should," Naruto begins, then stops abruptly: he swears it, he can _feel_ the crimson poring out of his pores and thinks he should at least get smarter from it, because with this much blood directed to his upper regions his brain has got to get a good deal more oxygen than usual. "Should we, like, check?"

"I guess," she says, but doesn't move, too occupied with the forming conclusions.

In the silence, giving her a wary glance, Naruto bends forward with overdone caution, like one preparing for solicitation with a particularly poisonous snake, and places a hand clumsy with gentleness against the soft curve of Sasuke's chest. "It's," he reports. "Um."

It's firm and soft and nothing particularly special. He's no idea whether that makes it real: has little hands-on experience with breasts and has had equally modest interest in exploring the topic further. Breasts are simply the heaviness on his front when he's used the Oiroke no Jutsu, a no-touch and no-look part on girls. Something to distract Jiraiya with, something that used to invade his dreams on and off to embarrassing effect when he was a little younger.

Before Neji's torso was flat and hard and perfect against his, only it did not look like Neji's.

And shit, what is he doing? Groping my unconscious rival, lost best friend?

It would be _so_ like Jiraiya to have broken him in at long last.

"Naruto? Naruto, are you listening to me? Oh, good god, would you stop touching him?"

He blinks, stumbles away, regretfully reclaiming the hand that had remained curved over Sasuke's breast.

"I should think it's obvious," Sakura says primly, covering Sasuke carefully with a blanket after hastily estimating that none of the blood seems actually to be his. Naruto wants to demand: _No, don't hide him, let me see, let me see everything of this person who left and who returned, whom I've missed and claimed, let me see the weakness and the betrayal, let me see him._ He doesn't. "Obvious that it has to be a version of your Oiroke no Jutsu."

Well, yeah, what else could it be? Too bad most of him is far removed from the childish voice inside him screaming in triumph about whose jutsu are the best now, huh, you bastard, reduced to my master technique, aren't you?

That spoilsport main part of him asks instead: "Shouldn't that have gone poof when he blacked out?"

"Yes," Sakura-chan agrees, forehead wrinkled like that of an old woman. "That's just it."

Naruto nods. "Yeah, he shouldn't have the chakra to maintain it." This is safe, this is normal conversation with normal people, and he could scream at the absurdity of it taking place with Sasuke warm and bloodied and home, not a meter away.

Sakura-chan looks at him until he feels like the idiot she so clearly sees him as.

"It has nothing to do with chakra, Naruto. True, people usually faint because they're out of charka, but he isn't. Oh god, he isn't." She looks a little wild around the eyes. "Do you remember Orochimaru's chakra, the feel of it, the immensity?"

That and the slimly sensation, snakeskin slithering through gore. He makes an effort to feel for himself, has never been any good at the subtle stuff but manages a brief, disturbing image of wave upon wave of power waiting to break over them. His neck itches from it, there at the base where chakra movement begins.

Sakura-chan makes a visible effort to calm herself, purses her lips and goes on, much like Iruka-sensei continuing a lecture against all odds. "So he's definitely not out of charka – but he should still have lost control over the jutsu when he fainted, it should have collapsed when he ceased imposing his will upon it."

"What that does mean?"

"It means," she snaps, tired and scared, "that Kabuto told the truth for once. He, he – joined with Orochimaru but won, and has the chakra of at least one Hokage now. It stands to reason that's not the only… change, which frankly makes it even odder that he managed to mess up the jutsu to this extent."

She closes her eyes, presses her wrists against them to forcibly push back tears. _It means I have no idea what to do, because I don't trust him and I don't trust myself to stop him, should it be necessary. I don't trust either one of us to do that, because I don't stand a chance against him and you could never hurt him. You'd kill yourself before you killed him, I know that, Naruto, but it's not that simple anymore. I love him and I love you, but it's not that simple. It can't be about just what I love, because that can't be enough._

At approximately the same time she thinks this Sasuke stirs, and Naruto's world shatters until all he has is a distorted image of Sasuke, viewed from countless angles and robbed of sense. Urgent and immediate and he doesn't know what he's doing at all anymore. Sasuke sucks in the world around him and all its meaning and vividness like a black hole. Naruto is not immune to the gravity, but has his scars to cling to, as well.

By cosmic coincidence that some call fate and others contrivance, the moment Sasuke's eyelids flutter is also the moment Mrs. Haruno answers the door, opens it for a tall, washed-out man in his late twenties or early thirties. The lanky ease of his walk suggests the former, the careworn shadows clinging to his face argue for the latter.

"You're – Sakura's teacher," she says, surprised into rudeness, recognizing the mask and the distinctly silver hair above the Jounin vest from her daughter's occasional bit of gossip.

Sakura has failed to mention, Mrs. Haruno thinks with dim venom, that the man looks childish and elderly at once, is so thin she is surprised his skeleton doesn't rattle as he walks. How his scarred hand, lingering close to a knife strapped to his thigh, smells of tobacco and sake and wet earth.

She reminds herself that Sakura is a big girl, knows what she's doing, can handle this. Hopefully she can.

"Do come in."

"Thank you." His smile is picture-perfectly polite, the empty arc of lips.

Her opinions do not matter.

When he was a child his parents mattered, and his friends, schoolmates, teachers, neighbors, the entire village's opinions meant the world.

Then his father went through what he went through, and others' opinions went from praise to scorn, from solace to something ugly and traitorous.

He tried not to care until finally, in a silence that was not at all like relief, he found he didn't.

Then there was the Fourth, and Obito and Rin, and one day in a forest after he'd shown them Chidori for the first time he discovered he did care, again or still, he cared a lot.

A half an hour later Obito was dead, and Kakashi realized what a fool he'd been. It was too late not to care about Team Seven, but he could damn well protect himself in the future, even if he couldn't protect those precious to him. Because I couldn't protect those precious to me.

Gray years followed, peaceful and echoing in the way that empty time is. He was the best ninja in Leaf because fear was lost to him like love, like hope, like the childhood he never had – there was nothing in the world that could be offered him or taken from him, and death was nothing to him because life was nothing to him.

He would have been better off like that. But things happened (uchiha sasuke happened, like obito long ago, like terror and happiness, short and shady) and he steps into the hallway of the Haruno residence for reasons that should have centered on responsibility, on being a teacher and a faulty role model, but that have more to do with black hair through his fingers, with the scornful twist of a smirk that broke through to him and broke him.

He's already moving for the stairs when the woman says, "I'd offer you some tea, but I expect you are in rather a hurry to reunite with your team." She bites her lip, a childish spasm of movement. "That girl seemed badly hurt."

Almost every ninja has parents to pressure them forward, into glory, to ruin them, into lethal glory.

This woman is as far from that as anyone can be.

"Alright," he says, and reacts, somewhere beyond the light fog of sake and disorientation, to her words: there is no hurt girl on his team. Rin's dead. "Thank you."

Sakura and Naruto both hear the tell-tale light footsteps on the stairs; she registers it. Grabs his sleeve, tugs on it firmly until his focus is torn away from Sasuke and he realizes they might have a fight on their hands. She's rarely seen him look so grim.

"Kakashi-sensei," she says in abject relief a few seconds later, when she and Naruto are standing outside the room, ready to repel intruders as best as they're able. She with words, Naruto, she fears, with naked fists.

It's funny what different manners your pleading can take.

Your needs.

The relief is colossal and staggering: she can see Naruto ease down the tenseness a notch or two beside her, but knows their fundamental understanding of the new situation is really very much at odds.

Knows Naruto will be eased because he is certain Kakashi-sensei would never take Sasuke to the ANBU.

I'm just glad I won't have to.

"You two," Kakashi-sensei says then with what is almost his normal little grin. His voice is odd, though, shades of life surging and fleeing and fighting beneath the bright, airy deadness. "Stay here."

He nudges them aside and slips into her room, closing the door behind him.

Sasuke freezes in the process of sitting up, filthy and naked below the blanket falling over his lap. Thin the way that comes from training like a madman but throwing up most everything you try to eat, pale like someone who's spent most of his daylight time in caves and deep forests lately. He does not seem badly hurt at all: bruised mouth, bruises on both sides of his neck and an assortment of them across the rest of his body, the occasional spot on his arms and shoulders and stomach and chest. Nothing serious, no visible cut that the blood could have originated from.

Remains so the mystery of his, so to speak, female attributes.

"Um," Kakashi says, a smile warming his voice. It's easier to be amused than angry or anxious. "Don't answer if you feel it's too personal, but how come you are suddenly equipped with these alluring mounds?"

Even after all this time he can apparently still make Sasuke go scarlet. Good, he supposes. Steadying.

And isn't that ridiculous: after a mad dream of turning female and seducing Itachi, of killing Itachi and using the Mangekyou Sharingan, and finding Naruto suddenly by his side, after all this he wakes groggily to stare at a ceiling that isn't his.

And now there is Kakashi, so fundamentally familiar and fundamentally wrong that he can concentrate only on the first, or he'll break utterly apart.

_Itachi... - no, no, no._

"Or," Sasuke says, collecting himself with an entirely new speed, not moving to cover himself, "you could walk out of the room and I could put on a shirt and we could pretend this never happened." A moment's pause, his brow furrowed in short but apparent thought: "Or we could skip the first bit and just pretend it never happened."

"Alright," Kakashi says. "Alright."

Kurenai suggested once that Kakashi has long since learned that with Sasuke it's better not to ask. This, like most of Kurenai's romanticized notions, is an utter misconception.

As far as Kakashi is aware, no one has ever tried asking Sasuke about anything real. Maybe he'd spill his heart out for a simple inquiry, potentially he might leak secrets like a broken bottle if invited to. Kakashi doesn't believe it for a second, but he's been wrong before.

Kakashi doesn't ask about anything real now because he never does. It's one of his lifestyle choices, like wearing a mask to cover a certain scar and having a series of adult novels for his best friend.

Were he ever to meet anyone pathetic enough to start blabbering their life's story without cue he'd have to make it clear he isn't going to listen (or just fall asleep, take a nice nap), but this far not asking has worked out fine.

He makes himself comfortable on the floor, sitting cross-legged and relaxed, shrugs, "Might be marginally less awkward if you changed back."

"You think?" Sasuke says, too light and scornful to be skeptical, because really, it is not as though either of them has forgotten. Then, with a snort that might or might not be mildly regretful, he adds, "I already did."

"Doesn't seem to have done you much good."

"No," Sasuke agrees calmly.

"I assume, then," Kakashi goes on, still distant and mild and lost, "that you'll have to grovel in the dirt at Tsunade's feet for a bit before she agrees to fix it for you."

"There's no way," Sasuke interjects flatly.

"I'll have word with her later," Kakashi says, some kind of sharpness underneath the bland tone. He recognizes it faintly, they both do. "She'll see to it that everything returns to normal."

He used the n-word. He could laugh. Doesn't, but only just.

"She will not," Sasuke says. "She can't."

Kakashi snorts, scornful and superior as ever any stupid Uchiha brat. "She can. The matter is whether she wants to, but a determined approach ought to settle that. I'd say an hour of groveling should be about enough."

"Absolutely not," Sasuke grimaces, bangs hiding most of his dark expression.

"Obviously it was a futile hope that you'd have grown past the spoiled brat stage," Kakashi remarks evenly, smiling and pleasant as he never is save when he cuts at you. "You're at the mercy of my limited knowledge in this field, then."

He says nothing about Orochimaru, all the raw words thick in his throat, sharp and bitter on his tongue (sasuke shivers).

"Don't bother," Sasuke dismisses, arrogant the way that comes with knowing your limits and knowing they are far off yet. "You've not grown past the spoiled brat stage yourself."

And there might be truth in that, there very well might be, because three years ago Kakashi's hand was in his student's hair, calloused fingers falling hard and fast for strands that were surprisingly soft beneath the coarse layer of sticky dust, thick and dark and smooth as ink.

He said, "I don't like boys,"

(obito, himself, those many many years ago)

and Sasuke was prepared to accept that much.

Certainly the claim begged the question of why, then, Kakashi stared complex cravings at him, adult desire and childish vengeance and masochistic narcissism, but Sasuke was used to reality being complicated, filled with inexplicable exceptions.

(every uchiha died, they said, and thinking about why he was able to hear them say it is too many shades of suffering)

He nodded, sharply, prepared to apologize or run or undress.

It was evening, shadows falling longer on the ground, transparent through his mind. Kakashi did that characteristic face with a raised eyebrow and a quirking at the left corner of his mouth, and, after a stretch of quiet time reaching beyond awkward into something hidden, he offered a long list of chakra control requirements he demanded Sasuke clear before he'd agree to give a pedagogic demonstration of the jutsu that had cut through lightning that once (a remarkably painful experience, after the rush had worn off).

With those words the interlude was assumed to be concluded. It should have been, shouldn't it?

Yeah, well. "Should" doesn't much matter.

Six nights later Sasuke stood bent forward, spidery hands on scratched knees, spine a gorgeous slope crowned by a dark head bowed in exhaustion but marked by a brilliantly triumphant smirk. Smoke curled from his fingertips, swaying in the weak breeze above the rock he had crushed into pieces.

Twisted brightness had been presumed to be over, spurned like childhood, like innocence: but Kakashi's hands placed themselves on Sasuke's hips, fingers hooked around prominent bones, palms stretched warm from buttock to thigh.

The one thing he'd wanted since he lost himself, and what did one more failure matter?

A bit of a startle ran through the child. If there was any surprise, though, and even that was doubtful, it was unclouded by disgust or pleasure or aggression.

"You want what I offered now," Sasuke commented, calm and concise, and the utterance was only a little bit a question. His throat moved around a swallow as he straightened in Kakashi's hold and turned under his hands until he stood with his head tilted back in inquiry, in challenge, his face fine-boned and scornful and arousing as only the untouchable can be.

(that's not exactly it, kakashi contemplated telling him, and in a way it wasn't, but hypocrisy is an art he has not mastered, and it wasn't exactly not what sasuke presumed, either)

What good are words?

Sasuke's fingers were on the edge of his mask, and Kakashi tilted his head downwards to study the closed-off face beneath his. With a certain determination clinging to the line of his jaw, with a spill or recklessness narrowing his eyes, Sasuke met him halfway, pressing thin lips flush against Kakashi's mouth. Kakashi's hand brushed up Sasuke's spine, flighty as a bird's wing, cradled the boy's head, tracing hair and ear and cheek until the lips let themselves be nudged apart.

Sasuke stood absolutely stonily still for a long, long second while Kakashi kissed him, then, fast when he did react, he snapped out of his frozen state as decisively as he had entered into it, heat radiating off his skin, strained pants echoing between his lips and palate. His hands sneaked underneath the Jounin ensemble, showing noteworthy skill in undoing its complicated clasps, nails scraping just a little too loosely over the bared skin.

Of course, Kakashi thought distantly, Itachi had a Jounin uniform as well, Sasuke must've played around with that…

He hadn't meant, honestly he had not meant, to have Sasuke's fingertips scattering like scared mice over the skin of his back. Now there they were, and there was something for him to have for the first time since everything he'd wanted had been stripped away, and this could be so good: Sasuke could be what Kakashi had failed to become, this distorted mirror reflection that wouldn't have to shatter like Kakashi had, and god, hell...

Only Kakashi could not handle goodness, could not handle dreams or hopes, and he did not think Sasuke could either.

He turned Sasuke over roughly, leaning him against another stone formation, trapping him between the rock and his teacher's body. Couldn't look at the eyes that Itachi had stared into when he broke Sasuke's world apart, so like his own.

The uneven stone cut into Sasuke's elbows and palms, kicked him in the knees and scratched at his stomach, partially exposed from how Kakashi was pulling up his shirt, fingers and mouth hot and furious on his skin. Then Kakashi's hand was thrust down his pants, and he hissed helplessly against the rock pressing into his front, not right knowing whether he was twisting towards or away from the man who was supposed to educate him.

He remembered the stuffy room Kakashi had brought him to immediately after he'd won the first preliminary round of the Exam Matches, recalled Kakashi sitting him down and producing an urn of thick smelly ink. The sort Sasuke's grandfather had used to write with.

Which had constituted a very disturbing association, because now Kakashi had been writing on him. With his hands, standing close and bowing over him, fingers spreading ink warmed by his body-heat over Sasuke's back, across his shoulder and down his chest. Over his stomach and down between his thighs, and hell, this is beyond embarrassing...

Kakashi hadn't said anything and neither had Sasuke, but there are other ways to communicate (like how kakashi had looked at him after he'd slumped, the instant before awareness had actually deserted him).

Weeks later, in this eternal instant, Kakashi had his hand in Sasuke's pants, and in a few seconds his …oh god, he was almost thirteen and the first phrase that sprang to mind to describe it was _reproductive organ_.

Afterwards, when Kakashi had cursed and picked him up and made sure he was patched together well enough no one could see there'd been anything to patch up, he said he wouldn't touch him again.

Sasuke nodded.

"I did believe you," he says, three years later, mostly naked in Sakura's bed with the man's eye hooded on him. "Whether that makes it better or worse."

Kakashi nods, on the far shore and fighting the pull of the water. "I bet Tsunade will stop by any minute."

She does, before Sasuke has answered – provided, of course, that he intended to, which Kakashi personally rather doubts.

The Hokage sweeps into the room accompanied by Shizune and a handful ANBU, followed by a frightened-looking Sakura and an angry, shit-scared Naruto who'd hurry to stand protectively between Sasuke and the Sannin if not for her telling him outside, "I'm not going to hurt him", and the knowledge there are certain things you don't lie about to the substitute for your dead brother.

Several of the ANBU startle, while Tsunade stands unmoved in the middle of the room. She does not immediately offer Sasuke anything to wear, because she is not the kind of person who grows uncomfortable from her adversaries being in humiliating positions, but discovers after a few heartbeats' time that Sasuke does not care about being nude anymore and gestures for one of her underlings to hand him a housecoat.

"I think there are some issues we should discuss."

Uchiha Sasuke would not have replied anything to that. Sasuke with a generous touch of Orochimaru smiles at her, the rotting sugary smile her lost one smiled. "Is that so."

Tempted to hit him she strikes deeper and dirtier than that. "Who knocked you up?"

xxxxxxxxxx


	5. Don't You Forget About Me

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci****: 05:**

**"Don't You Forget about Me"**

Below a sky wide as courage, and also below a dirty whitish ceiling, Naruto says, "You can't be serious."

"Shut up, Naruto," Kakashi-sensei tells him calmly.

Naruto gives him a hasty look of betrayal but focuses on Sasuke, who is certain to denounce this ridiculous assumption at once.

"None of your business," says Sasuke.

Naruto's world rocks. That's no denial, and he can't see Sasuke would refrain from acidly renouncing a lie of this variety: there is, is a child growing inside of Sasuke's body.

Well, it certainly serves to explain why the Oiroke no Jutsu remains firmly in place.

It's also a plausible reason as to why Naruto's world seems yet to be rocking under his feet.

"Everyone else out," Tsunade orders. "Yes, Naruto, that includes you."

Reluctantly the blond saunters into the hallway, crowded now by too many ninja. Sakura-chan buries her face in her hands, and he thinks maybe he should attempt helping out on that front, but how would he do that and why's she doing it anyway? She's not the one in trouble.

Then again neither is he, and he needs Kakashi-sensei's gaze hard on him to keep from exploding utterly. Sakura-chan's parents would probably hate him if he trashed their home – on the other hand they are fairly likely to hate him already. He never was too clear on how much the non-ninja population have been told about the Kyuubi business.

They've never mattered, not enough.

Not like Sasuke.

Oh god. Oh hell. (_oh,_ _sasuke!_)

The ANBU men have placed themselves against the door, clearly intent on keeping all the eavesdropping to themselves. Or, Kakashi-sensei slouches with his back against the doorway, the handle just clear of his hip, but Naruto isn't absolutely certain whether that's because he wants to hear everything he can for himself or because he wasn't steady enough on his feet to move further away. In either case the ANBU obviously don't dare suggest he move.

Wise, Naruto admits quietly. His teacher is scary when he wakes up again after being this out of it, and you never know when that's going to happen. Plus, Naruto's respect for the ANBU has dwindled down the dung drain over the course of the last three years. How many of them have been searching for Sasuke, trying to recover him? Hundreds? Hundreds of the ninja who call themselves Leaf's hardest and finest, yet all they seem to have managed is dying like flies and making a nuisance of themselves.

Probably Sasuke could have killed the entire bunch of them before even one of the clowns realized what was happening. After all, and Naruto swallows at this remembrance, Sasuke handled Orochimaru, once of the Sannin and of the Akatsuki, Hoshigaki Kisame, once of the Hidden Village of Mist and Akatsuki now, and Uchiha Itachi, greatest genius of Leaf and of the Akatsuki, handled all of them in ten days flat when he put his mind to it. Three of the most dangerous men to walk the earth this generation, people the ANBU didn't even manage to _find_.

Which makes Sasuke…what? What do you call someone that the scary things fear?

"Uchiha-san," is Tsunade's answer to the question, because this isn't Sasuke-kun but it isn't Orochimaru either (it isn't). "We clearly need to renegotiate our terms."

He is too strong for half-measures: it's either kill him or use him. She'd prefer the latter; once broken in the wild stallions are always the best ones. Unfortunately this will demand, and she swallows down something she does not want to identify, this will demand compromises.

Orochimaru was our mess, she reminds herself. Sasuke isn't.

And still, and still…

Sasuke would not have replied to that; Orochimaru would have smiled and touched things and said many outrageous words. The figure on the bed raises an eyebrow, looking a little faint, like she recognizes from countless teenage mothers and sexual assault victims. "So speak."

She does, and eventually he does, and she supposes they do reach an understanding, of sorts. This isn't Orochimaru, no matter whose that particular gesture is, or that posture or that way of looking out of the corner of his eye. This is a person she can deal with, that she might need. Provided he can be controlled he would certainly be useful, and while she is well aware she will never trust him she also knows Naruto will never stop. Killing Sasuke has to remain a last option.

Killing Kabuto is another story, already overdue.

"Come," she orders her ANBU, closing the discreet white door behind her, and they immediately assemble around her (they are not good for much, but this at least they can manage). Ignoring them, she turns to the unmasked people, Naruto's painful confused unstoppable happiness, Sakura's smarter despair. Kakashi she isn't trying to read. "Sasuke will remain here for the moment, I'll clear it with your parents. You may both stay with him. I trust I do not have to remind you to call for ANBU, should the slightest need arise."

(orochimaru will have made him familiar with the whip; let's try offering him the carrot now)

Leaving Sakura-chan and Kakashi-sensei contemplating various courses of action, possibilities that should be taken or left, Naruto crashes through the door and back into the numb shock of seeing Sasuke (he's alive again through it). Finally after these three dead years I am alive. Death never hurt like this, was just the slow grinding despair of empty years.

Sasuke is mostly-sitting up in the bed, and, well, he's really mostly his normal self. Only, you know, with boobs and stuff, clothes falling a littler looser than he's used to in some places and clinging tighter in others.

He honestly can't see why Naruto is staring like this. It is most offensive, the sole reason he bears it with such blasé expertise is the long-suffering experience of having girls drool over him since before he quite quit drooling himself.

He will not succumb to hysterics. He _will not._

Because unimportant girls staring is nothing like Naruto's eyes owning him up.

"You know," he says at last when he cannot stand it any longer, the silence and Naruto's look and everything it could do to him, even after all this time. Particularly after all this time. "They're not gonna disappear."

That's when Naruto's gaze jumpstarts from his chest-area and lands on his face, and he realizes he'd much rather have Naruto staring at his breasts than into his eyes. Alright, yes, it is annoying not to know whether he looks at those because he's in shock or because he's horny, but then at least the intensity doesn't hit Sasuke directly, doesn't force its way inside him.

"I still don't believe it," Naruto declares, blushing and defiant and chancing an exceptionally quick glance at Sasuke's stomach. "You wouldn't."

"What the hell do you think you know about me, Naruto?"

It is too much, this encounter, for both of them.

Blood is thick on his avenger's hands, and avenger is all he's been for some time now, and he cannot handle Naruto as that.

And Naruto is staring wildness at him, and Sasuke has always been what's worth fighting for, and fight they do.

Sharp words, raised voices, feeling thick as violence between un-touching bodies.

Until tension snaps, forcing Naruto's spine into an electrifying straightness, as Sasuke lashes out fast as a snake, lacing bone-thin, bone-hard fingers around Naruto's wrist.

"Feel for yourself then, you stupid fucking idiot!" he sneers, and doesn't think about what an idiot he's being until it's far too late. He's never backed down when it comes to Naruto.

With the words out Naruto doesn't fight the pull, lands on the bed too, hip brushing Sasuke's thigh before Sasuke inches it away. He's barely breathing as Sasuke gives him a look of something too deep to be disgust and arranges his hand.

So fucking stupid. Naruto could seriously hurt him now, kill the child probably, but Sasuke said what he did and can't undo the words. Can't want to, because if he can't convince Naruto, how can he convince himself this is real? so presses the other boy's hand to his abdomen.

This is so strange it goes beyond weird, feels natural: the inverted hardness of Sasuke's stomach under his palm and fingers. Gradually Sasuke's chakra diminishes, held in tightly, until Naruto can perceive a faint pulse imbedded in the other. The baby's beginning power, hidden no longer, drumming weakly against his touch.

He looks up then, and Sasuke's eyes are closed in a face serene with concentration. Of course, it must take a hell of a lot of that to force his chakra down to this extent.

Sasuke trusts no one, Naruto knows that better than anyone, but what could you call this but trust? Naruto's hand on his unguarded person.

At this somewhat inopportune moment Sasuke's eyes snap open, and Naruto has never had or wanted the ability to conceal what he's thinking, what he's feeling.

"Don't be dumber than you can help," Sasuke says. "I could let Sakura do the same, could kill you both before you even thought of trying anything."

"Oh yeah?" Naruto sneers back, because okay for defensiveness and he can see Sasuke has reason to be stressed, god, I am myself, but there has to be some damn limit. Jealous, edgy, hurt. "What are you suggesting?"

They're both brimmed for a fight, suddenly, and this wasn't how it was supposed to be but Sasuke's eyes are going slimmer and redder and his body tenser. Kyuubi pounds inside Naruto's mind and he remembers The Valley at the End, and thinks that shit, goddamn fucking shit, he has the Mangekyou now and he fucking killed Itachi. Hopes Kakashi-sensei will have time to rush in and save his ass before Sasuke _really_ fries it. Because he knows, with that humbling humiliating certainty, that even now he could never kill Sasuke. Could never want to, never live with that.

Thank fortune that drunk or not, Kakashi-sensei apparently retains the ability to sense mounting chakra levels. "Boys," he calls through the door. "You alright in there?"

"Ah," Naruto mutters on an exhalation, a small moan that probably only Sasuke can hear.

"Fine," Sasuke replies, louder but not by much. "We're fine."

Naruto can see him let go of anger and chakra and agitation, relaxing back into a state of deathly alertness. There's something about the faint lines at the corners of his eyes growing more weary. Death-wise, is the word someone else, someone with a greater vocabulary and poetic aspirations, would likely label it.

Not actually shaking his head, because then his face would brush Sasuke's and he's not ready for that, might never be ready for that – not shaking it, but feeling the inclination keenly, Naruto releases his own air and fear and disquiet with a ragged breath.

Not fear of what Sasuke could do to him but fear of what Sasuke could become, since the outlandish creature with the lethal beauty of something entirely alien, the creature that cradled his pumping heart between its claws, winged on the water, is regretably unforgettable.

And it's so ridiculous, so horrible, because we're supposed to be _fixing_ things, aren't we?

(is it possible to mend a broken promise?)

(a broken heart?)

"It felt – warm," he blurts. "Loved."

At least I think I am talking about the child.

Oh Jesus fucking Christ. Sasuke is pregnant. Must have slept with someone, and he just can't picture Sasuke being intimate with anyone but there you have it, and who would Sasuke ever allow to – do that?

He can't have cared for him, Naruto thinks. Sasuke doesn't care. It was just…breeding or something.

Sasuke snorts, a horrible grating sound that comes very close to a laugh. Entirely scornful, entirely disbelieving and discontent.

"_Loved_?" he repeats, as if it were the dirtiest joke he has heard in all his life. "Oh hell, Naruto, _loved_!"

He is laughing now, a short spasm of strangled sound. Naruto can feel Sasuke's pulse sky-rocket beneath his hand, which is only now loosening from the chakra paralyzis that hit it when Sasuke's chakra snapped alive before. He thinks there might be wetness around the corners of Sasuke's eyes.

Then Sasuke regains his calm as abruptly as he lost it, and there is neither merriment nor tears nor even a trace of either emotion in the composed lines of his too-pallid face with the swollen mouth and the violet shadows beneath the eyes.

"It is the Uchiha heir. It is as far away from…_that_… as anything in this world can be."

Naruto's dizzy for some reason, like the world has come into too sharp, too acute, a focus. His hand feels like it's burning on Sasuke's skin, partially beneath the scruffy gray housecoat.

He clings to the only part of the sentence he can deal with. "Aren't you the Uchiha heir?"

"I'm the Uchiha," Sasuke corrects him, with that familiar somber solemnity he has grown into now. "The only one."

_Itachi is dead_

"Right," Naruto says softly, schooled into respectfully muted tones as well. "But, um. Why didn't you just sleep with a girl? If you – if you wanted an heir."

Which you are too young for, what the hell are you doing, you're a boy, not a mother.

(_why didn't you just sleep with me?_)

"Most kunoichi are not even close to good enough," Sasuke replies, expressionless and factual. Of course he'd only want the best genes. Then he shrugs, adds, looking tiredly at the ceiling, "Besides, I'm not interested in girls."

Naruto thinks about decking him, then.

He doesn't think at all.

He says, "Oh."

"Yeah."

And it's so calm, so comfortable, and something is rising inevitable and unstoppable inside him, a dark kind of desire.

Sasuke's pulse under his hand is still wild: erratic and strong.

Naruto wants to close his hand around it, cradle it in his fingers. Sasuke tenses but doesn't move, doesn't so much as change expression, and Naruto realizes his grip has tightened. He can't loosen it (won't lose it).

"You," Sasuke starts at last, and Naruto wonders which one of them is panting. Probably I.

Mutters, under his breath, voice spiraling upwards: "This isn't enough."

(nothing has been)

Because Sasuke took it away – took himself away – unforgivable – god I need – I hate – it's all about – oh god you – me – _us_.

He slams Sasuke backwards, and Sasuke lets him or can't stop him. Next moment the Uchiha is spread out on his back upon the narrow bed, black hair over white pillow, Naruto's right hand still on his stomach, the left one cupping his face – Naruto is crouching over him, close, close, so angry and so needy and so – desperate.

Sasuke's elbow is placed precisely against the vulnerable spot at the front of his throat.

Naruto's heart is beating so hard he thinks he might pass out.

"What are you going to do, Naruto?" Sasuke asks at length, contemplative, hardly at all a war cry.

"I don't know!" he erupts. "But you _left_ – you fucking asshole you left us, and now you're back I don't know what to do!"

"Alright," Sasuke says evenly after some time. "Sit up."

"No." Since when does he take orders from Sasuke? That's just an aside, though. The real issue is the one he returns to: "I don't know what to do, but I need you back, I need you here, and don't you dare…!"

There's a knock. The pressure of Sasuke's elbow increases just a little. Naruto scrambles off of him.

"Hey," Sakura-chan says uncertainly from the doorway, like a stranger, a visitor in a room they have made theirs. "Kakashi-sensei just left. I… how are you?"

Sasuke stares at her levelly, intent and silent, he stares at her for a few seconds searching for a connection, reaching through the distance of old memory for knowledge of what to say and feel and think with regard to her. There's almost nothing – _she_'s almost nothing, so close to Naruto (itachi).

She has always, he recalls, been an annoyance, a hindrance, worthless and in the way. Always been too sweet, too soft, too stupid. So very much like everything he'd lost, and he might have loved her for that even as he hated her, if – if a lot of things.

Furthermore, she is mine.

The same way the ghosts are, who need him to protect them, need him to live for them, and who represent something he can't have anymore.

Utterly helpless, no good as a person of her own, belonging to him, if never with him.

Regardless of everything else, each other have always been one of the very few things people have.

"What's new with you?" Sakura presses, looking horrified, clinging to the role of polite hostess.

Sasuke looks thoughtful.

Naruto forces himself into a semblance of normalcy, a parody of what was him, once. Before Sasuke disappeared and broke him, returned and ripped at the masks.

"Yeah," he agrees loftily. "You must have learned something from the tongue pervert. Can you, I dunno, can you summon anything?"

Sasuke is looking at him again so it was worth the stupid flushing rush of words.

"I am the Snake Master," the Uchiha says slowly, as though talking to an intellectually challenged child. "Given that Orochimaru's power and knowledge have passed to me, I should think that would be obvious."

Now this is plainly and acutely unfair, and renders the repeated-into-holiness doctrine that Sasuke's leaving was the biggest mistake he ever made a useless misconception – at least if you look at things from Sasuke's point of view, in which power matters so much.

More than Naruto thought.

(more than naruto)

No, he reminds himself harshly, feeling the urge to slam Sasuke down again, claim truth with his own two hands. You didn't kill me, after all, in The Valley at the End. You could have. Would have gotten the Mangekyou. Chose not to.

Naruto was the good kid, stayed in Leaf like he was supposed to, obeyed orders within reason – and joy, he can summon an overweight frog king that might possibly, if sufficiently greased, agree to help him out.

Sasuke, who turned traitor and joined the lair of an S-class felon, is the Snake Master.

How the hell did everything go so wrong? (and no, maybe he's not thinking about summons anymore)

They are staring at each other again. He realizes it when Sakura-chan clears her throat, the sound like a rabbit's sprint from predators (snakes and foxes).

"I thought perhaps you'd like to wash off?"

Sasuke looks at her, then, with that intensity midway between blank and unreadable.

"Thanks," he says. "That'd be – nice."

Long forgotten words of clumsy courtesy.

"Great." Her smile is as short-lived as the sparse syllable, however, and with abject relief she turns to rummage through a dresser, producing a generous armful of towels and clothing. "Can you get up?"

"Naturally," Sasuke replies, putting bare feet with very long toe nails on the floor.

"Right. Naruto, perhaps you should come as well?"

Naruto turns towards her in surprise, and Sasuke levels a chill, sardonic gaze on her.

"I did agree to return here," he says, mild enough, unruffled.

"Of course," Sakura-chan says shortly, studying the floor with apparent fascination. "This way. I'll be back in a minute, then, Naruto."

Wild and winded suddenly (has to trust can't trust can't not) Naruto surges to his feet, clings to the doorway and stares after them.

Watches as, because the gods find obscure but obvious pleasure in mocking Sakura, they run into her father. He's clearly just been showering, is still toweling his thinning hair as he steps out of the bathroom and stops in surprise.

Sakura thinks she is going to die as she realizes he isn't looking at Sasuke as he's always looked at her female friends, cute little girls he's ruffled the hair of, that it isn't Sasuke's face that compels the majority of his attention.

Naruto is puzzled, disturbed, engrossed.

Thank god Sasuke isn't actually a girl, isn't used to being thought of or looked at as an object and probably doesn't notice, doesn't recognize the staring at his lips and breasts and hips for what it is.

"Hello," her father says, sounding confused and warm. "Who's this?"

Sasuke considers briefly. Do you bother upholding dignity in front of vermin?

It's the truth that he told Tsunade, that he never made a formal agreement to remain in Leaf, that he cannot be officially tied to a single crime.

But that's not what matters in the end, and he won't put anyone else through having their parents killed needlessly (least not his people).

So says: "Good afternoon."

Sakura half-turns to stare at him with a horrified kind of relief at the sound of his voice: more subdued now, caught in the politest of inflections, deep and a tad hoarse and could-be-sassy all of a sudden when pronounced by female vocal chords. "I'm Uchiha Sasuke." His deep nod is perfected, aristocratic. It also makes it very plain he is not wearing a bra.

Naruto's hand tightens on the doorway, snapping white paint between white fingers.

This is ridiculous, Sakura thinks, I was never this aware of his body when it was male.

Worse, indescribably worse, is how she has heard Sasuke introduce himself a hundred thousand times before, and always the reaction has been wary, arrogant, a study of stance and weaponry. Sakura realizes for the first time fully how misogynist society is when, this day, her father reacts to the greeting by nodding slowly, gaze traveling with interest and admiration over Sasuke's flawless cheekbones and the toppy swells pushing at his borrowed housecoat.

"Come on, Sasuke," she says in a hard voice and slams into the bathroom. With the door closed behind them they both remain standing awkwardly at first, Sasuke holding the housecoat together in the front with one hand and staring stonily at nothing, Sakura fiddling with the fabric she carries and throwing quick glances at the floor.

"So," she says at last, voice brittle and bright with nervousness. "Tsunade-sama instructed me to, to – how did she put it? To give you a tour through the rituals of femininity." Something between a laugh and an exhalation thick with unspilled tears passes from her lips. "Should I," she gestures helplessly, and she's never felt so stupid or clueless in her life, and she wants to cry, "show you how to apply makeup or something?"

"The essence of femininity, which for the record I highly doubt the existence of, is to be found in cosmetic products?" Sasuke asks skeptically with that familiar dismissive arrogance. He shakes his head, thankfully forestalling any reply. "It doesn't matter. She's just trying to yank my chain. I'm – I assumed this body in order to kill Itachi and …conceive. That's it. That's all."

"Alright," Sakura says tonelessly, handing him the bundle of cloth and pointing out the racks of sanitary products like a polite hostess, miles away from the stupid girl who has no idea what to do with any of this and has just declared she is a woman because she needs makeup to call herself pretty.

In her wake, for she flees hastily, Sasuke stares numbly at the heap of clothing before slowly, mechanically starting to remove his own garments. With the house coat pulled off and the remnants of the blue ensemble in ruins around his middle, he makes the mistake of looking up, catching his own eyes in the mirror.

Oh shit oh fuck oh hell. Jesus fucking _Christ._

He stares in mortified, horrified fascination, cold dread owning him through and through at the sight of too full lips, too slender shoulders, a pair of modest but undeniable breasts, hips broadening strangely below his waist. Unable to stop he tears the rest of his clothes away, gaze lingering inevitably and unwanted on the area between his knees and middle. There's a lot of blood on his thighs, and bits of something white.

Itachi was in me, there.

Before he quite realizes what's happening he's braced over the sink, fingers white around the cracking porcelain, unstoppable fast exhalations hitting the mirror, dimming the reflection into a merciful blur.

He is far from the world, deep in the red chaos, and I don't mind it.

Unfortunately nothing can blur the fact he's carrying Itachi's child beneath his heart.

When he realizes the small, hurt sound was his own he's already busy emptying his stomach. He hates the feeling of powers outside his control forcing his insides up, the painful humiliation of convulsing at his muscles' mercy. After three years, he thinks wildly, with a man who enjoyed licking people to death for a hobby and a living (three years in this man's torture chambers, three years in this man's _bed_) Sasuke is more used to puking than he cares to think about.

(i could get rid of it right now)

He shakes his head sharply, tasting stale bile, feeling the sink crumble in his hands.

If this had been at all about what he wanted, the child would be gone with a simple blast of chakra, a fist to his stomach would probably be enough to do it: but few things in life have ever been about what Sasuke wants. He can't seem to recall a single one, actually.

(country of the wave, but don't think about that, oh don't)

It's about what is needed.

The child will have to stay, yes he knows that. Only family I have, oh god.

Still trembly and cursing it he abandons the maelstrom of frenzied thought/feeling/memory sweeping through his head as best he can and steps into the shower. Blood and sweat and dirt are washed down the drain, leaving him empty and enraged.

It's too much, too bad, too strange.

(i can't deal with this. not right now. how dare this shit be my happy ending?)

A handful furiously fast seals later he faces a shadow replication, a perfect clone with his own face and his own hollow anger.

Except he had not expected, naïve idiot that he is, the female body. But of course it's there, of course it is, it's a replication. And the mental jerk away from the idea costs him precious seconds, he only just manages to duck the clone's fist.

Reeling now with familiar fury he wastes no time expertly dispatching it.

Not really calmer at all he shakes water out of his hair and wraps the housecoat around himself, bending to examine the staggering bundle of clothes Sakura left him.

Just before his hand touches the topmost layer his mind goes blank again, searching for that space beyond anger and sorrow but being denied, and shit, shit, shit.

Hopefully the four new replications will keep him too occupied to think for a while.

He bares his teeth at them, crouches down in blatant readiness.

He is drowning the last of them in the retches left in the sink when Naruto kicks in the door, Sakura hot on his heels.

Sasuke breaks the clone's neck instead and straightens, raising an eyebrow at the interruption. Only moments later, taking in the utter mess in the room, does he realize they must've been alerted by the noises of violent combat.

He fingers the large bruise on his jaw that one of the replications left him, feels it as something steadying, a reality-check.

Waiting for him in the bedroom, like they've been waiting for his ghost during the last three years, was one of the tenser experiences of Naruto's life.

Now here is Sasuke, and it's real, it's all real.

"I don't think you should be staying here," Naruto says. It isn't safe.

"Quite," Sasuke agrees, dusting off his hands and belatedly arranging the indecently hanging housecoat.

He still feels like a stranger to himself as he steps out of the bathroom, blurred redness a mercy between him and the world.

"Let's go," he mutters, and then there is Sakura's father. Eyeing him again, though kindly.

Sasuke's smile is nasty and a plain invite to try something (give me an excuse to kill you, any excuse) and the man has actually taken a step forward before Naruto's arm closes in possessive warning around Sasuke's elbow, and he realizes he's being an idiot and subsides.

Doesn't tug loose, because there's just no energy left in him.

At the door he does it anyway, freeing himself to bow politely again and thank the man for his hospitality. He can't get out fast enough, Naruto stumbling hurriedly after him.

Sakura slumps against the door, afterwards. Trying to repress the fact her father was _looking_ at Sasuke is draining.

It's incomprehensible, for a happily married man, not usually unstable, a man who's never shown the slightest interest in Ino, Ino who's at least as pretty as Sasuke – it's incomprehensible for such a man to ogle a girl as horrifyingly young as Sasuke.

She is aware this is not what she should be channeling her intelligence into; it is when she does force herself to concentrate on more dangerous matters that the answer comes to her.

Danger, indeed. Lethality. Something _absolute_.

Sakura herself could kill her father without effort, technically speaking. She could never do it, all the same, for the emotional restraints inherent in a healthy psyche.

She saw Sasuke's face in the bathroom, drowning the clone. She saw the blood on his face and hands and thighs before that.

Sasuke's bonds have snapped.

She assumes it could be a thrill, to be placed in a position of perceived control over a beauty who could slay you any second yet chooses for some reason to submit to you. Abstractedly she can see why people would consider Sasuke attractive, despite the fact his face is much too thin and his expression much too mean.

Something broken that you can pretend your attention can glue back together, something you imagine you can shatter utterly or keep whole.

She can reassure herself she isn't drawn to that by the memory of how Sasuke only scared her when he dove into Orochimaru's corrupted power in the Forest of Death, but it is not an entirely reassuring line of reasoning: Orochimaru, and wanting power, and Sasuke being attractive… she feels a little ill.

But no, she doesn't want anything extraordinary or dangerous. Maybe she should give Lee a chance, then (lee who will always be ordinary and safe no matter how much he works or how desperately he strives to become something else and more).

Except Lee doesn't know her. Has no idea at all who she is, no more than Sasuke or Naruto or Kakashi-sensei. The only one who really knows her, the real her and all of her, is Ino. Everyone else Sakura grew acquainted to only after she had learned the necessity and the skills of hiding that which it is inappropriate to show, present a perfect crackling front.

She has never stopped telling Ino everything. Never stopped trusting that despite their hissed insults and shows of rivalry, Ino will always consider herself above using a confidence.

Fact is and remains, however, that Ino could hurt her, could probably hurt her worse than anyone else in the world, since she knows with such instinctive perfect clarity which words will reach deep, deep into Sakura's core, which no one else even thinks exists.

Pointless ponderings, tonight (possibly every night).

She always has had a tendency to think instead of act, get caught up in ideas evolving endlessly, get trapped protectively in a winding maze of pondering and reasoning.

"I'm going out," she calls, slipping on her sandals and grabbing a sweater off the rack in the hallway, hurrying to close the door behind her before her mother can ask where she's headed.

Perhaps (probably) she should make sure her teammates are alright, but – I've always felt so exceptionally, sickeningly helpless around Sasuke. Naruto at least displays emotional need of her, whereas the Uchiha plainly only thinks of her as being in the way. In any kind of fight she's almost prepared to agree with him: he fights, Naruto fights, she stands on the sidelines and hopes she won't have to do anything. The only time she's part of the team during battle is when one of them has to jump in front of her, in between her and danger.

(when someone gets hurt it's the unspoken agreement they lean on her because everyone knows she won't be any good anyway, so that way at least one of them is free to defend the team)

(sasuke said: _thank you_)

Regarding other issues, when the goal isn't to win and survive (but to be happy?), then she thought she might have been able to do something, be worth something. Only Sasuke never respected her, never confided in her, never thought anything of her.

She knows with bitterly absolute certainty that he would not have left Naruto lying coldly on a bench the evening he left Leaf.

I know I would not have found him in The Valley at the End.

She is also disturbingly certain he would not have come with her back to the village today. She is… his responsibility, not something that he actually wants.

Ino pushes her window open after the third fistful of gravel has hit it, leans wearily outside with her hair a ruffled paleness around her sleep-soft face.

"Sakura? What…?"

She's ashamed, suddenly, to come disturb like this – wandered through the village lost in thought for a couple hours before she eventually gathered her courage and came here, which means it's late now and Ino was obviously asleep.

"I'm sorry," she says. "I'll go."

"The hell you will," Ino declares at once. "After you've woken me up like this you'd damn well better have something interesting to tell me, so get your sorry ass up to my room and spill. Now."

"Right," Sakura agrees, bending her head to hide a grin before she climbs the familiar wall and pushes herself in through the window.

"Sasuke's back," she says dully, seated close to Ino on the blond's bed. "He's also, oh god you won't believe it, he's also pregnant."

xxxxxxxxxx


	6. Okaeri, Asshole

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci****: 06:**

"**Okaeri, Asshole"**

Sasuke walks tensely beside him through the silent village night, Sakura-chan's gray housecoat flapping around his legs, torn in the front from the fight with the clones.

"I'm glad you're back," Naruto says, a choked admittance.

Sasuke turns to give him a strange glance before there is the slightest sound behind them, and in a second Sasuke is focused completely on the noise, his foot crushing the squirrel ruthlessly, kicking it with numbing force into the wall of a nearby house.

"Hey!" Naruto protests, grabbing Sasuke's shoulders to keep him still and safe. "You're not in enemy territory anymore."

Sasuke raises a chill eyebrow. "On the contrary."

"What if that had been a person?"

"Then they'd better learn to stay out of my way fast."

"Oh no they don't," Naruto counters furiously. "You'd better learn to stay out of their way if you can't control yourself, you selfish piece of shit. You're the one with the problem."

"I can kill them, they can't kill me," Sasuke summarizes, itching for a fight. "I'd say they're the ones with the problem."

"You're the one who can't tell friend from foe anymore!"

"I don't have friends!"

Naruto swings at him. Sasuke takes the hit on his collarbone, letting it ground him, before he brings his knee up into Naruto's stomach.

"Do too, asshole!" Naruto yells through the surprised groan of pain.

Sasuke's mostly adrift, still, trembly and disoriented and_ hurting_, and Naruto has never been the most subtle of fighters: they are rolling around on the ground in a few minutes, punching and kicking and biting everywhere they can reach. It is more immediate than any other fight they've ever had, bereft of chakra, focused on quiet straining.

With Naruto on his back beneath him, Naruto's fists pounding on his arms and chest (and god this is _naruto_) Sasuke starts to laugh again.

Naruto is laughing too after a moment, sharp desperate sounds like sobbing.

"If everyone who jumped me were my friend," Sasuke tells him between panted peals of laughter.

"I'm not just," Naruto protests breathlessly, and his hands are on Sasuke's neck but not hard, not immediately threatening, and their faces are close. "I'm the best friend. The only."

"Perhaps," Sasuke says, sobering. He's far from sure he has any friends at all, but words are only ever approximations, and maybe this description is close enough to reality to be acceptable.

He gets up on legs that are less steady than they should be, their response to his will dulled and clumsy.

He doesn't offer Naruto a hand up.

(won't lie to naruto, never really has)

The rest of the walk is quiet too, but a little calmer. A little easier, and somehow that makes it worse. Eventually he follows Naruto up ratty stairs in an apartment building on the outskirts of the village, graffiti thick over the mousy gray of the worn walls.

"Here we are," Naruto mutters outside a door in terrible condition, forcing a key to turn in the lock by brute force.

Sasuke steps unbidden into the hallway, proceeding rudely into the kitchen because said hallway is plainly not large enough for the both of them (is anywhere?).

He has a hard time orienting himself in the apartment; is connected again, to Leaf and discarded memories, through the reassuring pain of Naruto's blows, and this can't be right. This small, dingy space, the antithesis of the old grandeur of the Uchiha Compound and of Orochimaru's residences, of the tamed wilderness of expensive cedar wood or elegantly crafted marble; it is wrong for him and should be entirely wrong for Naruto as well.

Naruto, who has always been larger than life. Whose mere presence should explode these ratty walls.

"Hungry?" Naruto asks eventually, after a strange and surreal interlude of staring with lines of grimness and joy battling each other across his whiskered face.

"Not really." He has to reach for the words, but they are closer at hand than perhaps he would have expected, after the many days of silence and the shocks hitting him when those ended.

(in itachi's arms)

(itachi's death, and kisame's. after orochimaru's)

His frame is wracked by something that might be a shudder or a shiver. He feels cold in the thin housecoat, leans lightly against the unwashed counter.

(valley at the end. country of the wave. leaf)

"Lucky," Naruto says, rather obviously searching uncertainly for the right words with which to bridge distance and ease nearness that's too much, too starkly immediate and desperate. Sasuke can't take his eyes off him, the only moving thing in this shitty apartment. "Never figured you for a great connoisseur of fast food."

"I've never really eaten it," Sasuke says carefully, without thought. Idiot words, meaningless words, but he can't stop himself reaching out, trying to get outside of himself, and this is the least dangerous way in which he can do that. He chances a smirk, wondering if it looks at all like those he used to give, back when he had some semblance of innocence left. "What with how I've been a filthy rich ascetic for most of my life."

His fingers move against the counter, get sucked into a spot of some… disgusting sticky substance or other. Not gore. The place is a bloody mess, even if it's much cleaner than he'd ever have expected from Naruto.

(so am i at least i make the effort of putting up some kind of front)

"Tired?" Naruto asks, eyes almost blank with attentiveness. It isn't late but a lot of shit's been going down today.

"I suppose," Sasuke concedes. Adrenaline keeps him moving for now, but when it wears off he's going to collapse hard, and he'd prefer to do that on his own terms.

"Figures." A small smile, carrying the implication of the usual bright grin but no more. "Bedroom's this way."

Sasuke follows him through the disorderly kitchen, into the sleeping area with the cheap closet and single bed.

"Um, yeah," Naruto says before he can even think to raise the issue, opening the wardrobe to fish for a pajama. "I changed the sheets just a couple days ago."

Sasuke nods shortly. "Alright."

They have shared sleeping quarters a thousand times before, on missions. Kakashi's cheaper than Naruto's furniture, and one bed costs considerably less than two, and in the winter wilderness mutual body heat is the best warmth you can get. Which makes this at once mind-numbingly familiar and reelingly strange. He can't help but feel events are spinning out of his control, though he has held tightly to that for some time now. Can't anymore, not right now, right here, when he's so tired and it's so much and so little like home. Disorienting.

"Here," Naruto says and chucks something at him.

Catching the bundle on instinct alone, rather surprised to find a handful of fabric held up in front of him by his own hand, Sasuke identifies a pajama set.

This is no time to think; Naruto's back is turned, presumably since he's looking for nightclothes for himself, and Sasuke shrugs out of the ruined housecoat and into the pajama. Which, as it turns out, must have been Naruto's when he was several years younger, judging by the multicolored pattering on the worn fabric and also the fact it's too small. Much of his calves and wrists are exposed, and the shirt stretches taut over his chest, the pants cling indecently to his hips.

He hurries beneath the covers.

Naruto, changed as well, turns and looks at him again for a long time with soft, disbelieving eyes and with his jaw clenched hard.

Sasuke's skin always gets prickly, his senses itchy and uncomfortable, when he's forced to be around people long. He likes his solitude, a streak empathized by Orochimaru's need for it, but because of that, because of the joining and the dark oily mess it left in his mind, he can't ever be alone again and does not want to be lonely on top of it. Distraction is necessary, and easier to find with others around.

He's used enough to sharing a bed and definitely not in the mood for a fight, so scoots over without complaint when Naruto approaches.

Naruto slinks into bed more carefully than ever before, with baited breath. Sasuke is on his side, curled slightly in on himself, his knees jutting over the edge of the bed, presenting a spine protruding sharp as a blade from his back, between ribs clearly visible through the thin fabric of the pajama shirt.

Sasuke is a pregnant girl in his bed after overpowering Orochimaru, killing Itachi, using the Mangekyou on Kisame and allowing Naruto to carry him home (like a damsel in distress only with the temper of the dragon). After pressing Naruto's hand to his stomach and killing clones in Sakura-chan's bathroom and brawling with Naruto on shadowed Leaf streets.

If he starts thinking about the implications, about the identity of the child's father or even what that damn Neji proved to him what feels like long ago – well. Too late, but he is aware he'd better not.

He's often aware of that. This far it's never stopped him.

Everything still seems so much like an elaborately crafted genjutsu, a blissful illusion like those Gaara's desert grants you right before the end, with Sasuke seen but not felt, the re-forged connection of his hands in Sasuke's face slipping, his mind fogged by the horrible suspicion the Uchiha might fade any second, be gone again like a dream, a nightmare, so much heavily flesh-shrouded hope.

He swallows. Has to – make sure, as best as he knows how.

He rolls over, his front resting against Sasuke's implacable sharp-boned warmth, slides an arm around him, slow, careful, his breath tripping labored over itself as he firms the grip, pressing Sasuke into his body and holding on, desperately achingly tight (damn you neji sasuke myself).

Fuck if I'll let you go again, asshole. _I'll kill you myself before I let go._

There has never been anyone to show him how to do this, how to hold on to anyone, but this is Sasuke – no explanations necessary or possible, an operation in instinct and urge.

Sasuke had better be alright with sleeping locked in Naruto's arms, because he's not about to get any say in the matter.

He closes his eyes against the back of Sasuke's head, breathing short against the nape of Sasuke's neck, wanting to scream from terror and rage and humiliated desire.

Wanting to hurt Sasuke and to stop hurting.

Sasuke tenses but does not move as the arm comes round him, closing him in. He is drained, so horribly drained, and memory is in him like a shock, sudden and undeniable as the force of his teeth sinking into his lower lip. He knows perfectly well what he wants (or does he?) and why he can't have it: hits his body again and again with the memory of Itachi taking and dying until it quiets down, stops reliving a hundred nights of sharing a childhood bed with his brother.

He is almost ready to sleep, because (or so he tells himself) the day Naruto becomes a threat is the day Sasuke shall willingly kick the bucket, when the blond shifts, cradling him fully.

"Sasuke," comes Naruto voice, wavering and certain as steel against his neck. "Promise me, asshole. That you won't leave me behind again?" He should be demanding it, he knows. But this is far from clear righteous shades of sunlight, this is shady darkness with Sasuke in his arms and knowing he can't lose that, and knowing he can only keep it through Sasuke's willing it so (fuck you, uchiha sasuke).

Kyuubi wants to _bite the bitch's throat_, but Naruto drowns that thought in immediate sensation.

He is well aware Sasuke doesn't go to town with his promises the way Lee does, but also that Sasuke swore at age eight to avenge and restore his clan, and look at him now.

Sasuke's head is fuzzy and overheated, old desperation and new alike blurred with exhaustion, and with muted panic he realizes he's all tangled up in that red tread of fate between them. The words just slip out, lost to his will, just shut up moron: "I promise."

With the sounds out he feels raw, intolerably skinless.

"Naruto," he chokes out. "Let go." Can't take anymore, can't need anyone, can't go back.

"No," Naruto says after the barest second's hesitation, because this isn't safe, and he learned three years ago how much the unsafe can hurt, but – things are what they are. "If you're not leaving it can't be a problem I'm holding on, can it?"

Of course the notoriously retarded object has to come up with something remotely logical at the precise moment Sasuke's intellect is being washed under by the tidal wave of long suppressed emotion, hits the shore scattered and incomprehensible.

"It's a problem because I don't want to you," he manages at last. Adds, acerbically, "Besides, what's the point of my promising if you don't believe me? Release me immediately."

"No." Sullen and self-assured like any five-year-old brat (convinced in that childish way that this one thing means the world, and it does, it does).

"_Yes_," sneers Sasuke, who has walked the path of that kind of focus to its end today. "You will let go in five seconds or I'll make you."

"Try it." Familiar challenge, smiled but serious. He feels the grin against his neck, the teeth behind it.

And Sasuke does try. Must, because Naruto is pushing too hard for too much, for things Sasuke suspects he will never be ready or able to give.

Unfortunately his mind is still a fog, an emptiness around the scratchy slithering murmur of Orochimaru's voice, and he must keep it that way because what would fill it frightens him too horribly.

(_stay away, itachi!_ please)

He lashes out with an elbow, sloppily, kicks at Naruto's shins, but whatever else you might say about him, the idiot has the instincts to fight. Pins and clings until, in mere moments, Sasuke can't move at all. If he weren't so goddamn tired this would probably terrify him.

"You're not getting away," Naruto husks, voice breaking between the words. "Ever again."

Sasuke isn't angry, precisely, at the utterance – he's in the coldly remote place on the far side of emotion. Recognizes that all of a sudden this is very dangerous with the same chill, clear certainty he feels his Sharingan snap into activity.

Though obviously unable to see his eyes, Naruto plainly registers something is going wrong, his hold faltering minutely before attempting to tighten.

With a sudden spasm of furious strength Sasuke breaks free and slams Naruto down, hands on his shoulders, on his chest, one leg locked over his hips: you're not getting away.

"How dare you," he hisses.

Someone bangs on the wall. A muted voice, shrill the way old women's tend to get, shouts at them to keep it down, this isn't a private building and some of us decent folks are trying to sleep!

Naruto's eyes are wide and blue beneath him, so honest you could cut yourself on their gaze.

Sasuke half expects him to say something about how he really can't afford to get chucked out again, but of course he should have known better (naruto is too big for the material world).

"We're going to end this," Naruto says. "Now."

It makes Sasuke absolutely furious.

"Are we?" he says, light and arctic and smooth with scorn over all the jagged edges cutting his throat up. "What exactly is it that you have managed to do in this worthless village that makes you think you have a chance to stop me doing anything at all? Joined with the Pervert Hermit? Unsealed your demon?"

He's blabbering and he can't stop. Doesn't think that's ever happened to him before, wonders whether he should blame it on Naruto or Orochimaru.

Naruto freezes beneath him, going absolutely still like Sasuke has only seen dead people do, certainly never Naruto.

In a voice curiously like the ice on a spring river breaking he asks, hisses, begs, "You know? About Kyuubi. _You know_."

Sasuke raises an eyebrow, loosening his grip: Naruto isn't moving.

"It didn't cross your mind I'd wonder how you suddenly improved in the, The Valley at the End? That red chakra definitely wasn't yours." He makes a small, hurt movement, fingers tightening on Naruto's body, crumbling the pajama shirt, marking the skin beneath it. "Orochimaru told me all about it. Why?"

"You're still here," Naruto observes.

"Clearly," Sasuke replies dryly. What is the idiot on about now? And then he gets it (all the hatred, all the scorn, all the goddamn loneliness). His mouth goes off on him again, thankfully accompanied by a haughty, dismissive shrug, "It's a demon bound, it's not about you. It doesn't particularly matter."

Next second he's lying again, in Naruto's arms again, sprawled gracelessly across the bed and the other.

"Hey," he grumbles, shoving fruitlessly.

Naruto has his face buried in his throat and could bite, and anyway Sasuke doesn't have the energy to move. Lies back for just a moment and lets Naruto hold on to him for dear life: in his fifteenth year of living, fighting with his best friend and worst rival, most precious person and most hated betrayer, Naruto has been given the one thing he's wanted the most all his life.

(i've got you now)

Sasuke is too thin under his hands, too small and breakable with all the sharp angles and visible bones, but perhaps that's just the transformation technique, and Sasuke knows everything and he doesn't care.

Into that slim throat, into the relief of Kyuubi accepted and The Valley at the End brought to a kind of closure, into it all he whispers, _I love you_, only so quiet and choked there's no way Sasuke could hear him.

"Hey," Sasuke says again after a while, because he is terribly sleepy and Naruto is terribly heavy. Sasuke won't be moving him by force, so swallows and bites his lip and arranges his arms gingerly, tentatively, to circle Naruto's neck, hands resting on his shoulders.

Do what you have to do, only he does not feel a tool.

Unlike Naruto, Sasuke once did have a mother, was touched by a brother, knows somewhere far away how to stroke a quivering back, light steady hands up and down ribs and sides.

When Naruto looks up it's with wetly glimmering eyes and a smile that proves the sun has nothing on Naruto, and Sasuke is too open, too vulnerable to guard against all this.

Huffs and pulls pointedly away a bit, but the bed's made for a single person and he's not getting up so must remain lying body to body with Naruto.

He's so tired now that he's not sleepy anymore, head spinning thrilling, sickening.

"What's it like?" Naruto asks at length, brow furrowed now and still too close. "Being joined with Orochimaru?"

Sasuke tries to contemplate the answer but words are just fractured things now, nothing making much sense. He licks his lips, hears Naruto choke on a deep inhale, and says contemplatively, "I have the urge to learn every single jutsu in the world. I used only to care about the useful ones." He's quiet for a moment, vision swimming a little. "There's like a slimy shadow mumbling stuff in my head."

He could bite his tongue the moment the words are out. He does not need to discuss this now, gathers his depleted reserves to change the subject.

"How were things here while I was – gone?"

"Same as usual," Naruto says in a fast, hurt voice, like he too knows he shouldn't say this but can't stop himself, because he's Naruto and he's stupid like that. "Only empty. Only all meaningless."

Sasuke feels like he's dying. Not uncomfortable per see.

Naruto adds, with a fake smile that fades fast, "And how were things where you were?"

"Efficient," Sasuke says before he can spill words like _hell_, sharp and concise and actually honest as sleep claims him

xxxxx

Sakura too spends the night at a friend's house, sleeping for probably the thousandth time on an extra futon laid out alongside Ino's bed. They've talked for hours, or at least Sakura has talked and Ino has interrupted with fits of giggles and gasps and cries along the lines of, Oh my god! No way!

"Is this, you know, confidential?" she asks somewhere around three or four in the morning, when Sakura's stress-muddled brain is busily shutting down.

"No," Sakura mumbles in reply. "I don't think so."

Even if they'd wanted to, they could hardly have kept a returned pregnant Sasuke in possession of the Mangekyou Sharingan a secret for long.

Which means Shikamaru gets a visit earlier than he's ever wanted to.

The grayish light of dawn is sneaking over his face when his mom starts pounding on his door. "Shikamaru!" she calls. "That blond thing is here to see you!"

Huh? What the hell is Temari doing here now? Forcing his eyes open he registers the sunrise-pale light and figures it has to be pretty important for her to come knocking at this ungodly hour, rolls out of bed slowly like an old man with arthritis.

Five minutes later he's something at least approaching dressed and ready and ambles down the stairs.

"She's in the kitchen!" comes his mother's snide voice from the living room, and he nods to himself and pretty much falls through the doorway.

"Ino?" he says in total and abject confusion, because the cute young blond sitting uncertainly at the table very definitely isn't Temari. "Why…?"

"I'm sorry to disturb you so early," she says automatically, "but I thought you'd want to hear at once. Sasuke's back."

The words work the magic of a hundred cups of black coffee injected straight into his veins. "Elaborate."

"Well," Ino says uncertainly, and he realizes he spoke with the voice of a Chuunin commander giving orders. "Sakura stopped by my house really late yesterday. Apparently Naruto found Sasuke after he'd killed his brother and another Akatsuki and brought him back. She said Orochimaru tried to join with him but it didn't work, or, they are joined, but Sasuke's in charge. Also, and I didn't really get this part but it's what she said, supposedly he's stuck as a girl after he performed the Oiroke no Jutsu and got himself pregnant. He's, um, he's at Naruto's now."

Thoughts are running so fast through Shikamaru's head he doubts his skull will be able to contain them much longer, tumbling over each other, racing one another to the conclusions. Sasuke joined with Orochimaru and able to slay two members of the Akatsuki means a Sasuke even more ridiculously powerful than his potential had led Shikamaru to expect. Having killed his brother, he must additionally be in possession of the Mangekyou. This sure as hell isn't good.

Actually, the only bright spot is the fact he must be back quite voluntarily, since if the above reasoning holds true there's no way Naruto could have forced him. As a matter of fact, Naruto probably would not have survived a second longer than Sasuke wanted him to, and as far as Shikamaru's heard Sasuke hasn't caused any untimely deaths since his return.

"At Naruto's, you said?" he asks, still in that stony distant voice Ino hates even though she nods reluctant confirmation. "Alright. Good. Look, you stay here, okay? Or go back home. I'll see you later."

"And what are you going to do?"

"I need to check some things," he says, because Naruto was brighter than anyone should have been but then he stopped, and Shikamaru's no fucking hero but sometimes you have to try your best anyway. "Bothersome, but someone's gotta do it."

"I'll go with you."

"No offense," he says after a moment's heavy silence, because these are words that cannot be forgotten or forgiven but they're probably the only ones that can keep her safe, "but you'd only be in the way."

There is nothing worse in the world than having other people die for you, and this isn't even a mission. Least, if he hadn't fucked up and failed three years ago it wouldn't be.

And while Shikamaru fancies he would have been quite content as a cat or a sheep or whatever, he's a man and with that comes certain responsibilities.

It's not far to Naruto's apartment, and after a little fiddling with a throwing needle the lock admits defeat and lets him into the building. An old lady gives him a mean look of dark suspicion, and Shikamaru smiles at her, figuring it's a good sign she's alive and healthy enough to mutter complaints about him.

A few flights of stairs later he's outside the vaguely familiar worn-down door, punches it hard enough to split the skin across his knuckles.

Inside, reflexes trained into perfect paranoia, Sasuke sits up abruptly, ready to kill before his eyes are fully open.

"Hmm?" someone murmurs, and, looking down at the bed, he is reminded he is in Naruto's home, his host's arm a warm weight across his thighs, that he woke up for the very mundane reason someone is knocking at the door.

I might as well open it, then.

He's only just standing when Naruto grabs him. "Where do you think you're going?"

"To the door," Sasuke replies condescendingly, peeling Naruto's fingers from his skin and not letting himself grimace at the sight of beginning bruises, and walks pointedly towards his destination, pushing hair out of his eyes and undoing the lock.

Shikamaru stares at what the punched-open door reveals.

His eyes register: Sasuke in what is presumably his nightwear, which leaves no doubt about his current sex and is ridiculous besides, looking customarily pissed and prissy but with thankfully normal dark eyes. Also looking about twelve and disgustingly dangerous.

His mind is busy with the forming of an exceptionally horrible realization: Sasuke's… Jesus Christ, he's going to have to wash the inside of his brain with the strongest soap he can find to clean it off this vile thought, but if he hadn't hated the Uchiha's fucking guts… Sasuke's hot. Gods in heaven, Sasuke's hot.

Worse, in its way, is the sight of Naruto appearing behind his shoulder, looking silly desire at him. For years now he has faked beaming and blushing and brilliance, has faked it for so long that it takes Shikamaru a moment to realize what's wrong with the expression, but then it comes to him that it's real. It's fucking genuine.

Naruto's alive again, vivid as before Sasuke stole the life from him in The Valley at the End.

That's fucking great, isn't it?

He came here to make sure Naruto's still breathing, save him from the disaster called Uchiha Sasuke, and it turns out… what? That he isn't needed, no one else ever was, it's all about goddamn Sasuke. The only one who could take reality away from Naruto, the only one who could give it back, and who seems to finally have.

Shikamaru has never really hated anyone else.

"Yes?" Sasuke asks now as though he weren't standing indecent in someone else's hallway, bones poking at his sickly pale skin beneath the child's pajama. "I suppose there was something you wanted?"

"No," Shikamaru says. "Not really." At least, nothing he can have. "Actually, I think I'll leave now."

He's off before the expectedly sleep-drugged Naruto can open his mouth, probably before Naruto has fully come to grips with the fact he was there – Shikamaru is well aware the blond's brain does not snap into active mode before a hearty breakfast.

He meets up with his team later in the morning, Ino and Chouji and Asuma, and they're the same stupid worthless losers they've always been. This is as good as it gets, for all of them: sure, Shikamaru made Chuunin at twelve, a wholly decent age, but that's as far as he'll be able to go. He simply does not have the chakra required of a Jounin, never will. The rest of his team are still Genin, and he supposes if he bothers to think about it that it's for the best. Less work, less danger.

Worse still, Asuma is techniqually a Jounin, and he's dumb as a bloody brick. He's not one of the ones who matter, Shikamaru has long been well aware of this, wonders occasionally if Asuma is, if Asuma cares that he won't ever matter, not really (that you just aren't good enough).

Shikamaru envies him, if he doesn't. Because that's the drag about being a genius – he can see the end no one else notices, but is powerless to stop it coming. Sees with perfect crystal clarity everything he could have been and never will be. All the impossibilities, all the wasted stupidity of trying and trying and knowing you'll never succeed.

Damn.

"Ino," he says, trying to mend things. "We've got two missions to choose from. Wanna pick?"

"Whichever's fastest," she says, not looking at him.

He swallows the urge to sigh, knew this would be the result. Best he starts thinking of what to tell Temari, then, because Ino might hate him right now but at least she listens to him and stays safe, whereas Temari outranks him like shit and isn't even from his village. A suggestion along the lines of, _Oh, and by the way, Uchiha Sasuke's back, you know the really hot, really cool guy everyone's been itching to duke it out with for years. I'd appreciate it if you stayed clear out of his way, alright?_ – he certainly has a good enough grip on her personality to be aware that would not go over well.

"Shikamaru?" Chouji says in his kind, hesitant way, and Shikamaru forces himself to snap out of it.

(it's just so dumb, all of it, so bloody pointless)

He ran into Hatake Kakashi earlier this morning, and it's such a fucking _waste_. Shikamaru doesn't know the man and hasn't ever cared for him, but even he can see that much.

One of the harshly brilliant, just born like that, knowing no other way to be, one of the ones that _mattered_. Who could accomplish without thought or effort what will always be out of reach for pointless average people like Shikamaru.

And 'could' is the correct tense, because now… Shikamaru isn't sure, doesn't know Kakashi well enough to declare anything with certainty. He is, however, quite definite on the fact the man, once so obviously perfected, one of the special people, has withered into a sad, alcoholic, past-obsessed remnant of the person he was (of the person he was supposed to be, maybe). Thankfully it's probably only obvious to super-IQ people.

"Kakashi-sensei," Shikamaru said politely when he all but stumbled into the man just outside Naruto's building.

Kakashi looked at him as though he could not spontaneously remember his name, his existence. Eventually he must have come up with some recognition, though, because, "Are they up yet?" would have been a fairly pointless question had it not been obvious Shikamaru's business had been conducted in Naruto's apartment.

"Yeah, they are."

Kakashi nodded vaguely, didn't move.

Shrugging, Shikamaru didn't bother thinking again what a waste it was, what a stupid fucking waste, just passed the man by and went home to get some breakfast before meeting up with his team.

In his wake Kakashi enters the building, walks up the same shoddy flights of stairs Shikamaru recently ascended and then descended with the same haste.

"I'm looking for Uzumaki Naruto," he told the crone on the bottom in his most charming voice, and after a bit of glaring she spat out the number marking the door in front of him now.

No lock stops the handle from turning under his hand, and, pushing the door open, he is met by a surrealistically domestic scene. Across the miniscule hallway Naruto and Sasuke are sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, dressed in homely ensembles of pajama parts and baggy training clothes. Sasuke appears to be complaining about being served re-heated ramen for breakfast.

"You need to eat," Naruto cuts in. "You're thinner than Kakashi-sensei, think about the baby!" He speaks too fast to allow himself to stumble on the last word.

"I've been pregnant for all of seventeen hours," Sasuke sneers moodily. "I hardly think it's suffering just yet." He stops short, turns abruptly towards the doorway. "You too?" he asks, sounding very far from happy at the interruption.

"Kakashi-sensei!" Naruto greets, gesturing with a package of instant ramen. "Breakfast?"

He must look worse than he thought for Naruto to be this eager to buy him a meal. It's just hunger seems to have deserted him, these days.

It's so stupid, because true, he was shattering before that, but he broke when Sasuke disappeared and it would have been reasonable to assume he should not still be broken now the child is back.

On the other hand the world is not reasonable, life isn't fair, and anyway that wasn't how it happened. Breaks that clean are unusual. For Kakashi, like for most people, there have been so many little cracks (family and friends, team and teacher) until he was shattered. Three years ago was when he stopped trying to glue himself back together, when the frame that had held the pieces fell apart as well, from the guilt that he wasn't – that it wasn't Naruto he had been anxious to find.

The bitch (whom, admittedly, he rather likes when he isn't being bitter, whom he had a terrrible crush on once) called Life fooled him into thinking he had a chance, just one, a chance to make things right. But I probably never did, did I? He could refrain from touching Sasuke and fade into the background, or he could fuck him like he did and fuck him up. He couldn't see a third option then and he can't now, and he's not-strangely fond of the kid, always has been.

He doesn't like little boys, normally. It's just, because reality is an exercise in irony, it's just that he likes women, he loves the concept and the idea, but he's never found an actual, living woman he takes to. Kids aren't his thing, never have been, but there's Sasuke and that's different.

Worse, Sasuke isn't a boy at all anymore. An adult woman stares coldly back at him, and fuck, this is no time to be falling in love (nor for realizing you have been, for some time).

Unexpectedly, he thinks of Rin, Sasuke's antithesis in almost every way, his soft kind girlfriend from when he could still play at being a kid. The second most important woman in my life; dead, just like the first, though not by her own hand.

In ordinary circumstances it might have been fairly funny to watch their disjointed dance around plain attraction, inexpertly denied and shining through every look and gesture and touch, but clearly he's spent too much time with them after all because they are, are something like _his_ kids.

Except Sasuke isn't a child, nor truly is Naruto, and hopes don't speak the language of reason, nor does love, and Kakashi doesn't think he's capable of that but he's been wrong before (too often), and clearly the problem is he doesn't feel like a father at all anymore.

Also he sort of doubts it'll better his odds in the upcoming salary negotiation if Tsunade hears he made a pass at his student.

On the other hand she's a cold bitch and what he did before the Final Matches three years ago hasn't gotten him fired yet.

xxxxxxxxxx


	7. Crash and Burn

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci****: 07:**

"**Crash and Burn**"

"Did you want breakfast?" Naruto asks, already plucking an additional cup o' ramen from a cabinet and preparing the stove. "You should have some, it's good, right, Sasuke?"

"It tastes like the cheap pseudo-food it is," Sasuke says impatiently before turning back to Kakashi. "What do you _want_?"

"Oh, lots of things," Kakashi says lightly. "A hefty raise, tickets to the upcoming Icha Icha Paradise movie, a far-off death in bed at old age…"

Elaborating on nothing, talking without saying, is a talent he has nurtured over the years, trained with the same fateful dedication Lee bestows upon his taijutsu.

"Fine," Sasuke sneers. "What are you doing here?"

"Checking up on you. I thought you were supposed to spend the night at Sakura's?"

"Yeah, so did I," Sasuke mutters darkly, piercing the food in front of him with clearly unnecessary force. "Before her father started hitting on me."

"He did not!" Naruto protests, ears reddening. "Jesus Christ, that's Sakura-chan's dad you're talking about. He wouldn't!"

"He was addressing his greeting to my chest," Sasuke points out. "It's the fact he is her dad that makes it bad."

Sasuke looks a lot like he'd very much enjoy killing something, one hand going to his stomach in a gesture Kakashi has seen a dozen pregnant women perform, though usually their expressions are rather less murderous.

"We need to talk," he says.

"No, we don't," Sasuke snaps. "Talking is the last thing we need."

"I'm not saying we have to do it now," Kakashi goes on blithely, "or with company," meaningful lazy glance at Naruto and watching Sasuke go absolutely white, putting snow to shame with his pallor, "but yes, we are going to have a talk."

"_Fine_," Sasuke sneers, matching the rudest voice with the rudest face ever, slamming upright and marching towards Kakashi and the door. "Let's go talk."

They end up in the little space outside, the hallway accessing the apartments on the floor, where Kakashi rests against the wall because saving energy is a sacred calling. Sasuke leans back into the apartment and says, "This is a private conversation. I trust you, Naruto", before his face goes cold and expressionless and he crosses his arms over his chest, staring helplessness and hatred and humiliation at Kakashi.

Kakashi would still eavesdrop, and so would Sasuke, but Naruto is Naruto and starts washing up the dishes, the noises of running water and utensil hitting utensil overpowering any sound from outside. He still believes in truth, and morals (doesn't know how much you can be forced to forgive).

_I trust you, Naruto._ Jesus, the brat's got it bad. Do you even realize what you're saying, Sasuke?

"I don't know how you thought you could keep it secret, but it's fairly obvious," Kakashi says, looking steadily at Sasuke's inconspicuous abdomen.

"I never said it was a secret." Sasuke bites out the words. "I merely stated it was no one else's business."

"You're not innocent," Kakashi says. "You weren't three years ago, and I know I can be held accountable for at least part of that but it's not the issue right now, you weren't then and you aren't now."

"Whatever," Sasuke says. "Okay. Fine. It's Itachi's, not Orochimaru's. What more do you want to hear?"

"I'm sure you'll agree I'm not being entirely unreasonable if I express a certain surprise at the fact you chose to keep the result of an incestuous rape."

"It wasn't techniqually a rape. I just – whored myself out." Sasuke's forced smile up at him is nothing short of evil. "It would have been stupid not to. And as for keeping it – I need to rebuild the clan. Whose genes would be more appropriate to use than those of greatest Uchiha genius of all time?"

Kakashi makes himself sound dryly skeptical, condescending. "Yet, I take it, you are planning to somehow obscure this line of reasoning from Naruto?"

"I am willing to consider sleeping with you again to keep your mouth shut, if that's what you're wondering," Sasuke says, spiteful and scared.

"Jesus Christ," Kakashi mutters, allowing himself one touch, just one, a slow sweet caress that travels from the top of Sasuke's head and down his face. You stupid fucking traitor child, what did you come back for? "Tsunade isn't stupid; I'll bet you anything she's figured it out already."

"Tsunade," Sasuke says in an exceptionally collected voice, "has a certain pronounced interest in keeping her faux little brother safe and happy."

"That's no guarantee," Kakashi admits tiredly. "Bitter hag like her is probably more interested in seeing you squirm than in protecting anyone. Regardless she's hardly the only one likely to put the pieces together – Asuma's Chuunin kid's a creepy damn genius, Sakura isn't blind."

"I guess," Sasuke says sourly, staring shamefaced and shit angry at the floor. The kind of angry that's mostly a mask drawn brutally over collapsing helplessness and frustration. "Thanks," he adds at last, looking up for a brief second and offering a hint of a softening expression, bit of sunlight glimpsed between thick clouds. "You didn't have to be honest."

Kakashi shrugs.

Steps further down on the stairs interrupt the scene; minutes later Sakura emerges from the lower layers of the building, pale and fuzzy with lack of sleep and dressed in what appears to be Ino's clothes.

"Hello," she says. "Pakkun fetched me, so I came. What…?"

At approximately the same time Naruto knocks on the inside of his door. "You guys done out there?"

"Very done," Sasuke snaps, and Sakura startles out of her remaining sleepiness: in the gigantic sweater Sasuke looks blessedly normal, but his voice isn't a male's, never could be. He pushes the door open and enters with the thoughtlessness and haste of someone who actually lives here, expertly avoiding the sparse but crowded furniture.

Soon they're all assembled in the kitchen, Sasuke and Sakura sitting on the ratty chairs, Naruto on the counter, Kakashi leaning against the wall.

Sakura must admit it's something of an unpleasant shock: she always knew Naruto didn't have money to spread around, but the apartment is crowded and dirty; not the dirty that comes from its inhabitant not cleaning but the dirty that says it should be repainted, fixed up.

"I suppose I should offer you something to eat too, Sakura-chan," Naruto mutters distractedly, starting to search rather empty cabinets.

"She can have my serving," Sasuke interrupts, pushing a bowl of what looks like aged fast food across the table towards her. "I'm sure as hell not touching it."

"I thought we'd been over this," Naruto turns around to declare, hands on his hips (too eager, too tense). This isn't about what's spoken aloud. "You need to gain if you want the baby to be healthy!"

Which is probably true, because currently Sasuke looks about two meals away from dying of starvation.

"Explain again how that's any of your business," he says irritably, not moving to recover the meal. Which, unfortunately, Sakura can also rather sympathize with since it looks anything but tasty and the smell is beginning to make her mildly nauseous.

"It is because I say it is," Naruto announces with the haughtiness of a child. "You can eat by yourself or I can help it along. Your choice, you stupid ungrateful bastard."

Sasuke makes a sound like choking but does not stop staring at him, eyebrows raised in what might be insult or amusement; shrugging, Naruto leaves the counter and grabs the bowl Sasuke scorned. Clearly frozen by shock, and really Sakura can't blame him, Sasuke sits gaping and lets Naruto show a healthy bite into his mouth.

Five seconds later he spits it out, broth splashing over his front and the floor, utensils clattering away. His expression is the same murderous one Naruto has provoked so often in the past, save it has not been this chill before, this abstracted.

"You will die for this, Naruto," Sasuke declares with the calmest of convictions, and seeing as he's not only rising but forming seals, hands quick enough to be a blur, rendering the coming jutsu indistinguishable – given all this Sakura believes him for a horrible moment.

Next second a familiar fire technique burns several shadow replications and the larger part of Naruto's kitchen to ashes.

"Goddammit!" Naruto yells, voice shrill enough to only just steer clear of cry at the sight of his ruined apartment. "Sasuke, you asshole! My rent!"

"Something you should have considered before you tried to bloody spoon-feed me, perhaps," Sasuke replies rather icily, still moving towards his target and still looking very, very pissed, chakra well and truly engaged.

They're too high-strung, there's too much grinding uncertainty just below the surface. Everyone's snapping, in the most ludicrous ways.

This is going too far. It's past time Kakashi interfered; he would have before, though naively he believed Sasuke would show the restraint not to engage in ninjutsu inside an apartment building.

He should have remembered civilians have never been Sasuke's highest priority.

He should also have remembered Sasuke has improved a great deal over the last three years. Surprise saves him from terror as Sasuke simply ducks beneath his reaching arm, without even looking at him: plainly Sasuke does not consider him a threat. Plainly Sasuke has good reason not to.

Well, fuck.

"Boys," he says instead, in the mild ironic tone that put misbehaving teens to shame when the Fourth used it and still works magic.

It freezes Naruto with his back against the surviving part of the kitchen counter and an expression of grim apprehension, makes Sasuke pause close to him and stand back a little ways, arms falling limply down his sides.

Calming, Naruto realizes their noses are about one inch apart. Or, gratifyingly, since Sasuke is currently one of the very few people shorter than Naruto himself, his nose is about one inch away from Sasuke's eyes. Their hands are touching, Sasuke's knee is resting against his, and shit, that has to be Sasuke's breast ghosting light against my arm with every breath.

Sasuke too makes this discovery rather quickly, curses how he's not used to the new dimensions of his body. Warmth like fury surges through him but after all this time with Orochimaru he is hard pressed to think it stems from embarrassment.

"Now," Kakashi continues, blithely ignoring the spectacle, "about the reason for this impromptu gathering. I had word with the Hokage, and she insists that the three of you clear the upcoming Chuunin Exam. It starts tomorrow."

"I… what?" Sakura protests. "Isn't this a little sudden?"

"More importantly," Sasuke interjects, sounding faintly incredulous, "are you saying you haven't managed to pass it _yet_?"

"Like you're one to talk," Naruto points out grumpily. "You haven't either."

"No," Sasuke admits in his Talking To The Intellectually Challenged voice (scornful and rough). "But on the other hand the fact I've been labeled a wanted felon would have gotten me arrested if I'd turned up to take it. What's your excuse?"

"I just – we didn't – it doesn't matter!" Naruto stutters, flustered.

What the hell? First the mystery of why his team hasn't long since been through this, then the additional and worse one of why Naruto's so embarrassed about it – a mystery because there is no way Sasuke can think of they would simply have failed three years running.

"We decided Team Seven doesn't play reserves," Sakura explains, severe and staring at her hands.

Naruto elects to meet Sasuke's stare with defiance, ready to punch Sasuke's mouth shut around the mocking words no doubt forthcoming – finds the dark eyes softer than before, somehow. "You stupid idiots," Sasuke says, but it doesn't sound so much like an insult (and he hates himself for the weakness, they both do).

"Well," Naruto grins, brittle but working on brilliant. "Yeah."

"Just," Sakura says, still plainly uncomfortable at the kitchen table. "Wouldn't it be unfair? We're hardly on the same level as those taking the exam for the first time."

"No, you're not," Kakashi agrees easily. "But passing it is an essential technicality before you can be assigned higher-ranked missions, and we're short on people for those. Be glad the exam's in Leaf so you don't have to travel." He directs a very level gaze at Sasuke. "Tsunade expects you're good enough to do what you need to while avoiding causalities."

"Jeez," Sasuke drawls. "Fine."

"So," Sakura summarizes, sounding less than entirely happy about the proceedings. "We're taking it tomorrow?"

"Just as you've said," Kakashi affirms, smiling with his eyes closed to the world. "The interval before the Jounin Exam is relatively short, and you need to have cleared Chuunin level to apply for it."

"The Jounin Exam?" Sakura and Naruto breathe in chorus, reverent and shocked.

"You don't need to worry about that, Sakura. Naruto, Jiraiya said he'll be training you in preparation for it."

"Oh," Naruto says, glancing uncertainly at Sakura. "Right."

"Don't worry," she says, smiling a bit. He's so blind, after all these years. "I'm not unhappy I'm not taking it."

"That's great, Sakura-chan," he chimes, and his smile is sunny and irrepressible. At least he's learned to tell she's speaking truth, plain thought it is he cannot even imagine understanding the reasons behind it.

Everything in Sakura's world is about weighing risk and gain, about settling, and she feels a tad bit cold (watching naruto's shimmer and sasuke's little smirk).

"I trust you remember when and where the exam's held," Kakashi says, doesn't wait for Sakura's or Sasuke's nods before giving his characteristic nonchalant wave and sauntering off.

"I should probably go too," Sakura says. "Mom will be worried if I'm not home for breakfast, and I'll need to return these to Ino. But, later – where are you going to be staying?"

"Oh, shit," Naruto groans, again taking in the wasteland that is his apartment. "This is your mess, Sasuke, and you'd damn well better fix it!"

"The ruined apartment's yours, so's the responsibility for getting it ruined – I fail to see which part of the mess should be considered mine."

Naruto gapes like a fish, mouth crowded with so many retorts they trip each other up on their way out – staring into an expression so seldom seen as to appear inconceivable: Sasuke smiles.

It's a stunted, uncomfortable expression, but a smile all the same. I'd like to think the hurdles and the darkness are past now, and maybe things really can change. Maybe.

"Seriously," Sakura says, taken aback and shaking it off (he looks a little bit insane). "You need someplace to live, both of you do."

Sasuke gives her a quelling stare. "Unless I am very much mistaken I own just shy of fifty expensive buildings."

"The Uchiha Compound," Sakura says. "Right. So you'll both be staying there, then. Great."

She takes care to be out and away before either one of them can protest. She has learned some things through the years, after all.

Behind her in the apartment Sasuke and Naruto stare at each other, mute.

The silence is broken quite decisively by the advent of a slightly overweight man slamming the door open.

"Uzumaki!" he bellows, and Sasuke thinks he's never heard a word sound so dirty as Naruto's surname does now. This is quickly remedied as the man launches into a tirade filled with creative exhortations about what Naruto can do with himself, his stuff and his girlfriend, followed by some extensive speculation on his ancestry and finished by the sentence: "I swear on my mother's grave, you dirty abbreviation who should have been drowned at birth, you will never find another apartment in Leaf!"

Naruto bows his head with practiced ease, hiding expressions of old dismay, futile anger, bitterly smiling resignation, company-induced humiliation.

That last (because _of course_ sasuke has to be here to witness this) compels him to chance a glance at the Uchiha, who is witnessing the scene entirely cold and composed, with the raised eyebrows and scornful lack of expression so typical of nobility children being told off.

Thank god Sakura-chan said what she did, then, because after this sleeping on the streets will be his only alternative to moving in with his – _girlfriend_. Oh, shit. Oh, god. So right and so wrong and both a relief and a disappointment that Sasuke isn't throwing a bloody fit.

"He thought I was a girl," Sasuke says weakly at length after the landlord has left, face drawn together in a horrible scowl. "You can't even see any figure in this enormous sweater! What the hell's wrong with him? Is his eyesight defective?"

"Your face is pretty girly all on its own," Naruto replies, ducking reflexively even though Sasuke limits himself to a glare of painful death.

"Well," Sasuke says finally, after his rage has reached boiling point and dissipated. "Not point staying here."

"Yeah," Naruto agrees with a hint of melancholia. "I'll get my stuff."

Sasuke ambles along, standing in the doorway, watching as Naruto digs out a backpack and some bags and starts throwing clothes and weapons into them. And – oh. That old photograph. Without thought he is across the room, staring at it over Naruto's shoulder.

He hardly recognizes his own face.

The unmarked neck, the fresh innocence inadequately masked by the frown.

He turns away before Naruto can ask, trying to cover his faux-pas by demanding to know whether the idiot's done.

"Yup," Naruto says, throwing a bag at him. Reflex alone clutches it to Sasuke's chest. "Let's go."

And, hefting the backpack and the remaining two bags, he starts for the door.

Evidently expecting Sasuke to do his manual labor.

The hell I will.

He drops the burden to perform a quick jutsu. Clearly he needs someone else to carry the crap, and if he can get some sensible company in the process…

Naruto turns on his heels, face going dismayed, whisker scars crumbled, as he locks eyes with the snake.

"Jeez," he mutters with fake levity. "I agree we need to clear Jounin level so we can get our own teams of Genin slaves to do our manual labor for us, but what the hell do you think you're doing?"

Sasuke explains his dual purpose in a calm voice, purposefully choosing small, short words that even retards should be able to understand, because it's not really wise to currently think of Naruto as anything but a loud nuisance.

(it is not currently wise to think at all)

"You're seriously expecting to have a demon snake carry stuff across the village for you?"

"The fact you plainly cannot assert proper authority over your summons does not mean I can't," Sasuke reminds him icily, remembering the Frog King and the Ichibi, Orochimaru's power clawing through his weakness (his desperate failing attempts to protect people who should not have been so precious to him).

Missions. Things we used to do together when we were twelve.

"Though," he grudgingly admits, "I suppose Leaf wouldn't take so well to snakes." This isn't Sound, after all. He's not a feared lordship anymore.

A dismissive gesture and the reptile is gone. Sasuke frowns and bends to pick up the bag.

"I hate snakes," Naruto mutters, shifting his shoulder under the weight of his backpack. Elaborates, at Sasuke's haughtily inquisitive glance: "Ever since that big one ate me in the Forest of Death."

"You look remarkably healthy and animated for a pile of snake refuse," Sasuke says, cold, cold suddenly (_i'm the only one allowed to hurt you_). Discovers he is very pale and holding on to Naruto when he sees his own ice-white fingers locked around the other's wrist.

Orochimaru has made him more tactile, before the joining and after, because to invade someone's personal space is to invade his concentration, but this… is unexpected.

"No big deal," Naruto says, staring at Sasuke's fingers on his arm. "I can handle myself." He makes a face. "I thought it was – over, though, for a moment, you know. But I realized there was no way I'd die before I'd kicked your ass." He says the last bit lightly, like a joke, but there is really nothing funny here, nothing that isn't serious and doesn't have the potential to mean the world.

Sasuke is a thousand miles away, has to be, can't permit himself to be any closer in light of what has just been revealed, what it could mean, what he could do with it (what it could do to him).

(this isn't enough)

"Good luck with that," he sneers, looking away, dropping Naruto's hand hastily.

"Hey!" Naruto protests, and this time he's the one grapping, catching Sasuke hard around the elbow. After a split second of internal conflict Sasuke decides that yes, he might be glad he managed to reign in the reflexive impulse to strike out at the contact.

"I'm sick of chasing after you," Naruto says. "I'm not going to let you push me around, I'm holding on to – meaning."

Sasuke fights down panic – need and fear and anger, too much memory and Orochimaru's presence in his mind and that ridiculous stab of …_what could be_.

Forces himself to say, glad when the words come out only a little choked, "I did say I'm staying."

"Yeah," Naruto says, beaming hesitantly. "You did. You'd _better_."

He drops Sasuke's arm, they both take their burdens and just like that everything's normal again, only it can't be, and nothing makes sense anymore.

They are halfway down when Sasuke decides that carrying Naruto's stuff is what shadow clones are for and pauses on the landing to execute the jutsu. Speed has been with him all his life, and certainly it improved during his apprenticeship to the Legendary Sannin he eventually slew in spirit if not in body: no one without a Sharingan or Byakugan can tell in advance which seals his fingers slash through.

"Planning to beat yourself up again?" Naruto says, grinning cheekily, eyes watchful. "Suppose it's one of the few foes you can actually defeat."

"Shut up, dead last," Sasuke says, handing his bag over to the replication. "Bring this to the Uchiha Compound. Wait for me there."

The clone nods shortly before sprinting easily down the stairs.

"You sure that's a good idea?" Naruto asks doubtfully. "If it loses my stuff, you're the one retrieving it."

"How could it close it?" Sasuke retorts irritably. "Don't tell me you don't have your clones under proper control yet."

"Do too!"

"Fine," Sasuke says. "So why don't you use them?"

"Whatever, assface." Naruto too makes the familiar seals and loads his packs onto the two resultant clones, giving them similar instructions. "Huh. I guess it really doesn't take more energy to sustain them than to do the carrying myself."

"So even you can be taught? How surprising."

"Shut it, bastard!"

Sasuke scoffs at him, not deeming that one worthy of a reply.

Leaf Village is an entirely different experience in daylight. Memory is distant, suddenly, as though erased by the immediate reality of its contents. Sasuke feels himself staring dully at the winding streets and passing inhabitants, disoriented as though he were visiting a fantasy, a dreamscape.

He staggers through the streets, longing with sudden sick desperation for the shadowed simplicity of Sound.

"Hey, Sasuke," Naruto protests a few streets later, when Sasuke has been quiet and watching the villagers with steadily rising paranoia, wondering whether they recognize him. Presumably not, or they would have reacted. "This isn't the way to the Compound."

"I figured," Sasuke says, biting back panicked retorts and trying to save the shreds of dignity he has left, all the more precious for their scarceness, "that we might pick up some food and cleaning equipment on the way."

He hasn't bought anything for years: has taken or been given or denied whatever he wanted since he left Leaf. The store is too-bright and dizzying, and he lets Naruto pick most of their wares, only shrugging back into the here and now to sign the purchases to the old family account. The clerk looks rather surprised, which Sasuke supposes is understandable since the account hasn't been used in three years, but the numbers were correctly memorized years ago (when he was eight, and had lived in the mistaken belief that being allowed to shop for yourself was pretty great).

Once they enter the Uchiha Compound it's easier – no one else to interrupt, and the memories lurking here with their blood-stained solemnity have been clutched too close for too long to be a shock.

_He is dead_, Sasuke tells the shadows. _His child will revive us._

(his fingers brush quickly over his stomach beneath naruto's borrowed clothes, fleeing the feel of it as though it were on fire)

It's pleasantly numbing, a spiral down into grief so old it's almost a comfort, lost images calling to him from between every building. Three years' separation and Orochimaru's presence inside him, so much more immediate than Itachi's under his heart, have left a distance, a horrifying freedom.

His hands fist convulsively at his sides, seeking pain to forget the present, nails piercing skin – making him hastily, guiltily dry his palms on the overlong sweater. There has been enough Uchiha blood spillt upon this ground, drunk greedily by the earth that bore them, fed them and then reclaimed them.

It is his graveyard and calms him gradually, the further into it he goes, the flawed happiness and that which broke it asunder.

"Remember when you brought me here?" Naruto says in the stillness. "When we were kids." The words leave an odd taste in his mouth, because through an agreement so mutual it needed never be voiced they decided it had never happened, that day seven years ago when Sasuke's parents' grave had not yet been overgrown with grass and Naruto had just been chucked out of his apartment again, and Sasuke screamed at him in the Uchiha Compound.

Sasuke's quiet is bad, this time around. Too dense.

"How could I forget," Sasuke says, still immersed in conversation with dead people though aware too of the living. "You were exceptionally rude."

"So were you," Naruto retorts, indignant and happy, suddenly. Sasuke's here. Naruto will kick his ass and keep him, and the sick longing can end.

"You deserved it," Sasuke argues, as though that justifies everything, constitutes an end of discussion. And actually it does, because they are approaching the heart of the Uchiha sub-village and from the way Sasuke stops, gradually as if the energy to move seeps from him only slowly, slowly as he takes in the horror, the remembrance hits Naruto like a punch in the gut that of course Sasuke doesn't know, he's been absent all this time, there's no way he'd have heard about the fire.

"Oh," he says, in an entirely normal voice that makes Naruto literally squirm with guilt. "That was – I except we shall have to settle for another building, then."

He makes as though to turn and head back to the still standing part of the compound, but somehow he remains standing frozen right where he is, one hand raised in some unfinished gesture and looking wayward and lost where it hangs suspended.

His family home lies in front of him, ashes on the wind. Only the stone-crafted foundation remains, a few scattered traces of something utterly gone.

There is no coming back, then. I always knew that (always denied it).

It would have been too large to be practical anyway. Hell to clean, too many rooms for just him and Naruto. Unsuitable in either case since a house filled with its dead inhabitants isn't appropriate for strangers to tread through.

It's just as well.

Just as well, and the reason he fists one hand and presses the other painfully into his stomach isn't at all to obscure their trembling, or to contain the lost violence in them (oh no).

xxxxxxxxxx


	8. Cry Freedom

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 08:**

"**Cry Freedom"**

Naruto reaches for him; Sasuke violently slaps his hand away.

"Don't touch me," he spits (i'm too brittle).

"Don't be an ass," Naruto snaps. "I'm trying to help."

"I don't want your help!"

"I don't care! Maybe you need it!"

Sasuke hits him. It's a good, clean punch that takes Naruto in the jaw, forces him to stumble a few steps backwards.

The clones tense, where they're waiting a few meters behind them. Sasuke throws them an annoyed glare, dismissing his one through a release of charka pressure and dispatching Naruto's with two hastily hurled shuriken.

He keeps his hands close to what few weapons he currently carries, aching and yearning for a fight.

Which doesn't come. "Right," Naruto says, straightening and cradling his face. "I guess you needed that, too. Let's go find somewhere else to live now."

"Alright," Sasuke says, subdued. His childhood connection to reality is gone. What does it matter? Itachi is gone too. He shudders.

Two streets later they reach the house they camped in years ago, and the choice seems as good or as bad as any other.

Sasuke enters without hesitation, but only after Naruto has pushed the door open, caught for a moment by the thought of how weird it is that someone so obsessed with a lost idealized past as Sasuke has never come across as sentimental before. Even now he's only a little paler than usual, a little more cut off.

It is obvious at once Sasuke enters both that this is _home_ and that no one but mice has visited since he left (save naruto, but he does not know that). Everything has gone to dust, to waste.

He puts a hand on a dirty wall for support, surprised he's able to touch it, hears Naruto's footsteps, sees rather than feels the hand on his shoulder.

(just doesn't have the energy to shake free)

"You alright?" Naruto asks. "What can I do?"

"Just get on with it," Sasuke mutters, disgusted at his own weakness. But then, what is there left to be strong for? His life mission is accomplished already. Everyone who has ever mattered save Team Seven is dead (some by his own hand).

"Okay," Naruto says softly. "Wimp."

The insult gives him back the energy, born from the familiar annoyance there at the core of him, enables him to stumble into the kitchen and start putting the modest amounts of purchased foodstuffs and utensils away while Naruto bullies a couple of new clones into cleaning.

Having set them to work in the outer rooms he too ventures into the kitchen, stands watching Sasuke's lethargic mastery of household tasks.

"Sasuke," he tries after a while of being ignored, of Sasuke appearing impossibly immersed in the simple work at hand.

"_What?_" Sasuke snaps. It's too much, he's stretched too thin, too taut.

Naruto stares at him and tries to absorb the reality of his presence, understand it, and Sasuke's spine is a line of tension visibly bristling even under the rather baggy sweater he claimed, and saying or doing something comforting is the only decent course of action when Sasuke's just witnessed his home burned down after Naruto failed to warn him, but Naruto doesn't know how to give that. Doesn't think Sasuke knows how to receive it.

He says, with the brutal honesty that has always been between them, beneath everything else, the implacable need to share, to be part of: "You're the only one I have ever really hated."

"Ex_cuse_ me?" Sasuke sneers, upset enough to slip into the language of his childhood, fast losing interest in the plate that clatters uselessly to the floor, snapping around to fix an absolutely murderous look on Naruto.

If Sasuke were the kind of person who wanted softness, wanted white lies and kindness, Naruto would keep silent now.

(if that were the case naruto probably would not have been here at all)

Sasuke has always been too intense not to hurt, and Naruto too knows what it's like after the burn has faded, when there are only ashes left. It's left me vicious too.

"I thought I hated Orochimaru," he says. "But that wasn't it. I hated that I'd had something important taken away from me, but he wasn't the one who could do that. You're the one who left."

"What's your point?" Sasuke says at last, merciless because there is no mercy to be had, not in this world, not between the two of them.

"I don't know!" Naruto cries in frustration (in hatred, in love). "But you left and I needed you back, and I still need that but I don't know if I can forgive you!" He backs away to stare at his own words, ones that boiled under the surface for months without acknowledgement but with the stark raw honesty that cuts.

"Get real," sneers Sasuke, his voice thick with venom. "Forgive me for leaving? I didn't see you trying all that hard to get me back! If you needed me so much, maybe it was a little pointless wasting all your time doing absolutely nothing! That's why I had to leave, can't you see that? You just do nothing, all of you, how the hell could I accomplish anything like that!" He sucks in a breath, continuing in a calmer, frostier voice, "How dare you try and judge me, you hypocritical asshole? Maybe if you had all the facts, but you never will, and you know why? Because it's not your business, it never will be, you _don't matter_!"

Naruto feels his pulse pounding like sledgehammers through him, can see the matching wild glint in Sasuke's eyes. Nothing exists now beyond the fury and the complexities behind it, and this is Sasuke, and this is beyond words. Has been almost from the beginning.

You do not hit pregnant women, but this is Uchiha Sasuke and Uzumaki Naruto, and the rules have never much applied to them.

Sasuke's duck is sloppy like a child's with eagerness, no thought behind it except the need to connect, bury his fists in Naruto's body. He takes a hit to the shoulder, feels his bones jolted pleasantly as the distant rush of pain passes through him, kicks Naruto in the thigh, hard enough for the blond to crash into the kitchen table, for the table to break under the impact.

He's up again in an instant, Sasuke's foot meeting him halfway, but he absorbs the hit this time, pushes forward, and they're close now, really close, strangling would be an option.

Sasuke clings tenaciously to reason through the blood-black rush, clings with great desperation though small success to the knowledge this cannot be about charka or jutsu, must be only strength and speed, busting physicality, emotion channeled through body alone. Because if he does use real attacks he cannot promise he will stop in time and that's – inconceivable (_unacceptable_).

An upset monologue that he isn't listening to is going on, about missing and need, and he isn't sure which of them is speaking (perhaps it is both of us).

He stares at Naruto with eyes dyed the hue of the Mangekyou Sharingan, close enough to see the pores, and Orochimaru's chakra is like contained lightning fighting for an outlet; Naruto is altogether too close, Sasuke wants too much and too many contradictory things, and this is stupidity (he thought he'd learned to stop wanting things, goddamm it all).

There is so much between them, they're not ready for each other, they are unable to be anything but what they are, connected in all the most essentially painful ways.

Rage and desperation are in him, and desire like a shock, and he is frantic for anything to cling to as the world just continues to shatter around him, and what does anything matter anymore, pride or reservations, and he's so caught up in the certainty it could never happen that he hardly notices how it does.

It's all too much, and somewhen their movements have grown slower, packed with intensity so thick time appears almost massive, and maybe Sasuke didn't mean for it to happen but someone must have, and it seems too easy a way out to presume it is Naruto who lets their mouths brush, as hard and seemingly accidental as everything else about them.

The fight is out of him the moment their lips connect, the heat and fury taking a different turn. He's still quite ready to pound Naruto to pieces, but the loathing and anger is directed inwards, and the fever is all for Naruto. All for everything that could have been.

Naruto is clumsy and tender and rough, growling against his mouth, and Sasuke's legs are shuddering, and his hands, resting against Naruto's chest preparing to push him quite violently away, close around fabric, holding him up and Naruto against him.

He's crushed between the counter and Naruto, and he's grown so thin recently that it hurts where bone grinds against bone or tree, but when have I ever been intimate with anyone without hurting?

This is honest, at least. And this is Naruto, and Sasuke's never known when to stop around him, and this is _too much never enough_.

He's trembling like a rabbit, heart pounding and fingers white in Naruto's clothing; needs more and doesn't know how to get it, and he'd swear it's the same for Naruto.

Who has his arms around him now, too hard but Sasuke isn't complaining. He does open his mouth to say something, but Naruto's evidently having other ideas about what to do with parted lips (kakashiorochimaruitachi), and it's bleakly brilliant.

He has to stop this. Knows sexual matters, forced and pleasurable; knows Naruto, and is thus well aware a deaf-blind-mute could perceive this is not an intelligent course of action.

They have not gone far, but this is too desperately too much.

He claws at Naruto's throat, bites at his mouth, sucks at his lips, licks at his tongue, has the attentions uncertainly but forcefully returned (can't think at all through the rising panic and pounding arousal).

At the same time this unfocused stream of not-really-thoughts washes numbing through Sasuke's brain, a girl finds her knock unanswered and the door unlocked. She's been raised not to enter uninvited, but the Uchiha Compound is large as its tragedy, and a house in which she can glimpse movement through the window isn't an opportunity she's willing to pass up.

Just in case it is the shadow of a dead she's seen she sneaks inside with all the skill Kakashi-sensei has managed to ingraine in her, hears muffled sounds from a certain direction and – stops abruptly in the doorway, hanging on to the wall because all of a sudden her knees are rather faint.

She sees Naruto's back and a little bit of his profile, his eyes closed, one arm around Sasuke's hips, the other hand cradling Sasuke's head. Sasuke's hands trapped between them, one at Naruto's chest, the other at his throat, his mouth open against Naruto's.

This in and of itself is not very intimate: an awkward and fairly innocent kiss, no matter how hungry. There is nothing obvious to explain the overwhelming sense of intimacy and desperation, nor the brutality cloaking the scene, the impression of wild punishing rage beyond the small, softened movements, violent as she's only glimpsed during blurred, heated moments of battle.

Sasuke struggles in the grasp, whether to get closer or to push them entirely apart unclear. Apparently notices her, for his eyes, open now, focus on her over Naruto's shoulder, and he says her name as though not quite certain whether she is actually present.

"I'm interrupting," she says. "I didn't know. I'm sorry. I'll leave."

_Oh Naruto, Nartuo, my stupid baby boy, don't risk yourself so eagerly, think of the pain that could come, be careful, oh please..._

She's accepting it, Sasuke thinks with detached horror, feeling Naruto's skin flush under his fingers, the sudden rush of air as they step away from each other. And what Sakura accepts is the smart thing to do and the inevitable, what she accepts you are not getting away from.

"No!" he finds himself saying. "Stay!"

"Yes!" Naruto agrees, fingers opening and closing over the new strange emptiness of not holding Sasuke. "Please stay, Sakura-chan!"

She will, of course. She'd do considerably worse for their sake than watch the horribly uncomfortable display at hand. Sasuke is strangely unembarrassed, with just a pale rosy hue to his face and his gaze mostly at the floor. She'd have expected him to be furious but he seems only introspective. Naruto's toned crimson from forehead to neck, but the line of his jaw speaks of determination alone.

They're looking at each other, looking at the floor, at each other, floor, each other – Jesus Christ, men! First fighting, if the broken table is any indication, in a vulnerable kitchen and with one of them already risking a miscarriage due to what certainly looks like self-inflicted starvation, then this palpable confusion in the face of emotional outlets other than destructive ones.

Perhaps she does not want a boyfriend after all.

"Um," she says at last, briskly as she can, because plainly she must be the one to handle this: Naruto's staring with apparent deep concentration at nothing that way that means he's occupied with some memory or other. "It's fairly late; maybe we should just go for an early dinner?"

There's disinterested agreement all around, and with his usual disregard for others' presence Sasuke turns to liberate necessities from the cabinets. Naruto too dives into a cupboard, emerging triumphantly with a package of rice.

"I must say," Sakura says in a desperate attempt to make small talk. "I'm impressed at how fast you cleaned the place up, and so thoroughly."

"Hn," Sasuke says without looking up from his current occupation with some kind of meat.

"Right," Naruto recalls. "The clones. I'd better dismiss them." A thought stops the unsealing, and he adds, a little sheepishly, "Maybe I'd better inspect first."

Returning after a calming excursion in the rest of the smallish house, he's given the day's… fifth? Sixth? ...shock in the form of his haughty nemesis bent familiarly over a frying pan, handling the item with apparent easy grace. Naruto had been certain that if the kitchen smelled homely of cooking food it would be due to Sakura-chan exercising expertise in the field, definitely not because Sasuke is evidently a fair chef.

"You can cook?" he exclaims, sneaking closer to the figure that was tense and bony and perfectly right in his arms, knows he shouldn't think about that. "Since when can you cook?"

"Since when do you think?" Sasuke snaps. The irritation runs out fast, though, and he sighs, raising a thin eyebrow. "It's basics."

"Yeah, well," Naruto mutters, trying to steal a bite and getting smacked on his fingers for the trouble. Ouch, asshole. "You lot had parents to teach you how."

The look Sasuke gives him is very odd. "No," he explains slowly. "We were a – very traditional family, and I'm a boy, or at least I was then. My parents would have been most upset if I'd shown any interest in cooking."

"Oh," Naruto says uncertainly. Knows this isn't the kind of subject mere words were meant to convey.

"Having parents," Sakura-chan admits into the growing silence, "mostly seems to mean I don't have to learn because they cook for me."

"Oh," Naruto says again, forcing easy gladness into a diversion from how he's still focused on Sasuke's intent face bent over the frying pan. "That's a luxury."

"How did you learn, then, Sasuke-kun?" Sakura-chan asks.

Quiet is unbearable in these circumstances, and while it has never been Sasuke's habit or hobby Orochimaru always did like to talk, and perhaps it is rubbing off on him because he finds himself answering. Anything to spare him the need to think, to feel Naruto beside him. He speaks through the red shadows, stupid distracting words.

"After, there was this old lady who was paid to take care of me – came by maybe once a week to clean and do the laundry and cook. I was supposed to keep the food and just reheat it, but I think she must have had a daughter or something because there was never quite enough of it. And… I'd get hungry, and there was stuff around the house that I knew was used to make edible dishes, and I'd experiment. Eventually I got some of it right."

Like he has now, the food cooked and ready. He turns off the stove and watches Sakura take bowls and chopsticks from their cupboards.

They eat in silence around the counter because Sasuke isn't a talker and besides is busy repressing vivid memories of Orochimaru's mind in his, Itachi's heart crushed between his fingers, Naruto's lips on his mouth. Sakura and Naruto, who are talkers (because some things are harder to forget in quiet), remain silent as well – honestly, what would they say?

Only things that cannot be spoken.

(i heard it was yesterday that you – conceived, and that you assumed this female body in order to do so, and to kill your brother, and it was yesterday too that you slew him – and my suspicions are so unbearably ugly i could never utter them, and please sasuke-kun dispel them for me, trust me enough to tell me a truth i can stand to hear)

(i need you. i hate you still, in ways, but i love you too, you know; and there's death and life between us and that can't change but nor can the bond, and possibly you'd kill me but i – i'd like to hold you again, and this could be – could be really good, and give it a chance?)

You're an asshole but you're my everything.

What the hell am I going to do?

Given how Kyuubi is sealed inside him, sharing body and mind, it's frankly absurd and more than a little frightening that he should feel himself closer and more irreversibly connected to a certain moody Uchiha.

Sasuke watches without comment as Sakura bullies Naruto into washing the dishes, watches Naruto grumble but grin, watches her start drying them.

Eventually he can stand it no longer, feels hypnotized by the blurring sounds and movements.

"I'm going out," he mutters, and after this kind consideration on his part Naruto has no business giving him that betrayed half-panicked stare. Thankfully Sakura's hand snaps out to close around his arm, forcing him to stay with the dishes.

(he slips out of the house like a shadow, something slippery and lost, tied to the living world in mutual need but never truly part of it) He feels the echoes of the dead through the soils of his feet.

At first, in this surreal but not particularly unpleasant mood, after he's realized he's forgotten his shoes but can't be bothered going back for them, he thinks the figure spotted close to the gateway cutting the living part of the village off from his is a ghost

Of course, no Uchiha wraith springs to mind endowed with a shook of silver-white hair, or a garish paperback, or with the godlike gift of turning up every time Sasuke is vulnerable and wants to lick his wounds in peace.

(or i'll give itachi that last)

(kabuto's twisted mentor impulses were easily discouraged by moody silence and a few particularly sickening genjutsu)

Why is he even surprised to find himself closer than he wants to his old teacher? Always expect the worst, at least you'll be properly prepared and disappointment becomes a foreign element in your life – I know this.

"What are you doing here?" he asks evenly.

Kakashi shrugs; not answering works almost as well as not asking. His face is that perpetual mask of ironical, entirely contained amusement at the world's follies.

"Alright," says Sasuke, who has learned some things about follies and the world both these last three years, and moves to stand beside him. A respectable distance away and a little more because you can never be sure.

"You alright?" Kakashi asks at length.

(last time he took care of sasuke he ended up cursing and exercising what little skill he has in medical ninjutsu, sasuke refusing to scream but breathing irregularly with his fingers crushed white in his hair, kakashi lacking any right to hiss as the strands were pulled.

"shh," kakashi said, and his mouth was still laid bare, and soft, and sasuke's skin beneath it was soft too. warm and lively, everything the dull chill eyes staring at him were not.

they still are, dark and dull and chill)

"I've been worse."

He stands in silence for a while, then turns to offer a small secretive smirk that fits better than it should've on his thin pretty woman's face.

They both know too much about each other; the silence is restful.

Eventually, after long quietude of ghastly moonlight and distant chill, Sasuke grows restless.

"I'll see you around," he offers, resigned but with a bit of a smile. Kakashi doesn't stop him and he walks faster now, the ground no longer warm enough to be at all pleasant under the bare soils of his feet. He travels by way of certain streets, certain rooftops: some areas are most infested than others with what they once were.

He sees Naruto halfway, lets himself be found as well after some brief hesitation.

"What are you doing here?" Sasuke asks him, just like he did Kakashi. It's a good question.

Naruto shrugs too, putting one hand behind his head but not coloring, not ashamed anymore. "I walked Sakura-chan to the gate."

"Huh," Sasuke says non-committally. Wondering if that does or does not contain the obscured continuation: _and I was looking for you_. Wonders if he wants it to.

"C'mon," Naruto says, and they walk the short distance back to the house. Naruto is blabbering less than usual; Sasuke lets the noise wash comfortably over him.

It's late now, after a long day, and Sasuke shrugs away in the hallway, announces his intention of going to bed so he won't be disturbed.

Things like that don't work out around Naruto.

"Doesn't sound half bad," Naruto says. "Where – I mean…" He flushes expressively.

_Good point_, Sasuke thinks (feels like laughing and like kicking something). Fucking good point.

Ignoring Naruto because he doesn't want to reply he slips off into the bedroom, closing the door behind him and dusting off his feet before changing into a pajama. There's an Uchiha crest on it and it's almost the right size: must have been left behind by his late aunt and found by the clones.

He crawls beneath the blanket and closes his eyes, lying curled on his side facing the doorway in a fetal position, just like he's done every time he's laid down for sleep since he was eight. Orochimaru used to make crude and cruel jokes about it, but even that didn't change anything, couldn't reach deeply enough for that. Sleeping is the physical incarnation of vulnerability, and some acquired childhood instincts are persistent: it was years before he even learned to stop calling out for his mother when the nightmares rode him.

(months before he stopped expecting to turn around and see itachi smile condescending love at him)

Twenty or so minutes later, which is actually longer than he had estimated, Sasuke opens his eyes to see the shaded outline of Naruto nudge the door open.

"Hey," he says, mock indignant and sounding like he's probably blushing. Sasuke can visualize the face too clearly, so much like it was three years ago, only gaunter, with that little smile beneath the awe-teared eyes. "You're such a black hole of suck as a host, sneaking off to bed and leaving me with the kitchen floor."

Sasuke shrugs, not rising to the bait or the memory. "I'm not a host at all – you're supposed to live here, aren't you?" He's relieved his voice comes out as even as it does.

"Yeah," Naruto murmurs. "Yeah, I am. I don't even wanna think about the rent."

"Who would we pay rent to?" Sasuke asks, momentarily confused before he remembers Naruto is intellectually challenged and elaborates with great condescension: "As the only living Uchiha left I own the entire compound, including all the buildings. Why the hell should I pay rent to myself? As for you I – I suppose I did toast your kitchen."

"Right," said Naruto. "That's – good. Um, it would also be great if, you know – oh, just move over!"

Sasuke considers, then obeys, knowing he should be mentally kicking himself for not thinking to bring an extra futon. He isn't in a mood to fight, doesn't want to sleep on the floor and doesn't want Naruto out of sight where who knows what he'd get up to.

Naruto is not used to the foreign body heat soaking into his side, that closeness, immediate and intrusive (loves it until he chokes on it, but it's not easy relaxing into it).

We fucking kissed.

Sasuke slaps his hand away without turning when he experimentally rests it on a prominent Uchiha hipbone, and Naruto rolls over to lie back to back with a huff that is a little relieved, a little insulted and a lot of confusion over this complex want edging through him.

Sasuke is not at all confused, staring unseeingly at the wall. And why yes, that the only way to get rid off temptation is to indulge it is one of the few of Orochimaru's doctrines that make irrefutable sense. He'll see if it passes until morning, if it hasn't he'll have to see how far he needs to go.

He swallows. There will be no more fumbling touches that could mean something. Sasuke deals in sensation, not in emotion.

(sasuke sleeps)

Wakes to the knowledge the intensity hasn't passed at all.

Desire's physical manifestations are marginally different as a girl, and his experience is hardly an incentive to indulge them (itachi, distant pain and acute memory, blood in the grass and dropping into his eyes) but life is about survival, not pleasure, and he needs to end this: and Sakura's smart in the little ways that don't matter and she took one look at them and accepted it as inevitable, so we might as well, right?

Which means Naruto wakes up into previously unimagined (are they really?) circumstances.

Smell is always the first sensation that happens to Naruto, invading his dreams before he has fully woken up. Sleepy, distracted, he tries to sort through it: cheap soap from his own bathroom, clothes that have lain in dusty storage for a long time, something sharp and un/familiar. Skin, with light traces of the night's sweat, another person's blood.

Naruto was probably at least five or six before he realized no one else could tell unseen people apart by their smells. He was twelve when he realized why he could.

Then there are the sounds: soft rustling of fabric against fabric and fabric against skin, the whisper of hair brushing over a pillow.

Sensation, then, and he's starting to realize it's quite real: the mattress shifting slightly, a warm body pressed up against his.

Oh shit (_oh god)._

His eyes blink open in record time to look at Sasuke's eyelids sliding languorously open, take a moment to appreciate the horrifically good fact that though expressionless Sasuke is lying exceptionally close, breasts crushed flat against the side of Naruto's chest, their stomachs and hips aligned.

Naruto swallows. He is quite aware this is boundary crossing on many levels, and of the final, inevitable kind.

(his right arms squirms free from under a pillow and sasuke's shoulder, his hands meeting around sasuke's lower back)

Still businesslike, moving with economical grace, Sasuke pushes himself up on one elbow and slides a thigh across Naruto's hips, half-sitting in his lap.

"Sasuke," he says, in question and warning, hears the name come out hoarse.

Looking chill and untouched Sasuke says with concise conviction, "I want you," and kisses him.

Saying I want Sasuke would be a bit like saying I want to breathe, yeah.

Raging and tender he gathers Sasuke to him, kissing back as hard as he can, his hands getting lost beneath Sasuke's clothes.

He's hardly even made out with anyone before and now he has Sasuke's mouth sliding hotly open against his skin, Sasuke's fingers busy on his buttons, Sasuke's naked skin under his hands. He could – cry or something, only he's too intent on the rush of blood away from his brain.

Sasuke makes a soft, haughty noise, a little like a snort though breathier, and Naruto's hand finds a breast, and Sasuke squirms in his lap, pressure against his sex, and Naruto might not be entirely certain what he's doing but there is no way he's stopping now.

Not with Sasuke breathing hard against his chest, and Sasuke's hands on the waistband of his pajama bottoms, and the bony arcs of Sasuke's hipbones cutting into his palms.

And I do know. It's you and it's me. Naruto knows. The us-ness is familiar, always.

Lost and found in Sasuke's mouth, (this is too much what am i doing _oh_ never stop touching me) his fingers sneak adventurously inside Sasuke's pants, stroking clumsily against heat-slick skin, and Sasuke's biting his jaw, hard, really hard, and Naruto moans and doesn't object and there's – wetness, and he thinks that means Sasuke's – _ready_, and I'm _so unbelievably painfully hard_ and – and the door is slammed open.

Sasuke is out of his lap, studying the bedroom doorway with the intent of a hunting dog, by the time that too is pushed unceremoniously open, heralding the advent of a ridiculously robed child.

"Are we meeting _you_ in the Chuunin Exam, leader?" the boy cries with some depth of emotion Sasuke couldn't care less about exploring, then apparently registers the scene he has walked into and goes suddenly very still and quiet.

Oh shit, Naruto reflects: Sasuke's eyes are going cold and reptilian the way they do sometimes, and Konohamaru is in essence defenseless. Acting fast and, he recognizes a moment later, very thoughtlessly, he grabs Sasuke by the shoulders and throws him down. That one moment later he discovers this move leaves him leaning over a manhandled and not really dressed Sasuke stretched out on his back in their bed.

Smiling an altogether too pleasant smile, and Naruto would act on his suspicions right this instant if not for the distraction presented to him, Sasuke squirms until one of his legs is between Naruto's thighs, and for a split second Naruto's world is frighteningly pleasurable. Next moment, of course, Sasuke jerks his knee upward, and the universe implodes in intense and immense agony.

With a pleasant smirk still curving his mouth Sasuke easily pushes Naruto off and leaves the dumbass lying in a sad heap bemoaning his injury while Sasuke sits up properly, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed and directing his gaze at the still-frozen and vaguely familiar child who has apparently been shocked into a traumatized realm beyond the reach of words.

"The Third's brat? You'll be meeting _me_ in the exam."

Konohamaru takes one last terrified look at the smirk and the snake's eyes and a lingering glance at the uncovered body parts and flees.

xxxxxxxxxx


	9. What You Can't Know

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 09:**

"**What You Can't Know"**

After Konohamaru's departure and Naruto's return to functional state, when Sasuke's left the bed and is buttoning up his pajama shirt, Naruto asks slowly, "Why did you act that way to him? I mean, normally – you don't gloat. Not like that."

"Orochimaru does," Sasuke replies promptly, continuing towards the door without looking at him.

"What?" If that makes sense it's a terrible kind of sense, and, and–

"I said I am in control," Sasuke replies, measured and merciless. "Not that he doesn't influence me."

"You're saying," Naruto begins in a voice of dawning horror, "that in a manner of speaking I've kissed Orochimaru?"

As if that's the relevant issue at hand (but there is no way orochimaru can change sasuke, that anything ever can make sasuke be anything other than sasuke. i am sure of that, if i am certain of nothing else in this world).

"No," Sasuke says in a definite and decidedly deadpan voice. "Trust me, that would have been quite a different experience."

"Huh?"

"Nothing. Look at the time, we should get going."

There's no clock in the room, but Sasuke can be like that and judging by the midmorning sunshine he has a point.

In the interest of not having to claw out his inner eye Naruto gratefully lets the subject of Orochimaru and making out drop, following Sasuke into the kitchen. Where he's struck by another nagging question.

"Anyway," he says, picking up a startlingly whole vase that must have tipped over during the fight yesterday. "You must have slept with someone before, so, um…"

Sasuke, who has learned a different vocabulary, pauses in his inspection of a particular drawer to give him an amused, speculative look with a lot of edge to the raised eyebrow. "Are you implying I'm a slut?"

"No! Of course not! How can you even think that?" He's beaten people up for saying less offensive things than that about Sasuke.

"Because I suppose that would be largely justified," Sasuke cuts him off, because let us be honest here and see how much Naruto can take before he runs off.

Okay, a new winner tops Naruto's mental list of Most Unexpected Utterances Ever Made and effectively shuts his brain down. "So," slips out of his mouth. "Are you saying, uh, how many people _have_ you slept with then?"

Finished taking out mugs and bowls, Sasuke gives him a calculated glance and at first Naruto doesn't think he's planning to answer but then he does: "Three."

"Is that including, you know…?" His cheeks are probably going to explode from crimsonness any second but he's compelled not to let the issue rest.

"Although apparently this fact has mysteriously escaped your attention, I haven't actually slept with you," Sasuke reminds him dryly.

That'd be a no, then, Naruto concludes glumly. Three other men, that must mean.

"But," Naruto returns to the original question. "What I wanted to ask. Who's the, the father?"

The spoon is slammed down on the counter with only a little more force than necessary, Sasuke speaking through the noise, back turned and tense again. "I don't want you to know that."

Naruto pauses, absorbs this, and after picking apart and reassembling the sentence in his mind demands, "You don't want anyone to know, me included, or you don't want me in particular to know?"

Sasuke too takes his time replying, still carefully facing the other way, his shoulders hunched like a big ugly blackbird's. "Both," he says at last.

"Alright," Naruto concedes after a little while. "Your child, your decision."

Choose your battles, indeed.

"Good," Sasuke says shortly, sounding prissy and sour but apparently he's grateful after all for he asks, "Do you want an egg with your rice?"

"Yeah. That'd be great. Thanks."

Sasuke snorts, but puts a bowl with rice and egg and salmon that does smell horribly tempting under Naruto's nose a few minutes later.

"Aren't you eating as well? _Sasuke_…!" Because although there is indeed a similar bowl in front of him, Sasuke's main occupation with it appears to be pushing its contents around in an entirely unsuccessful imitation of an eating person.

"Don't nag me," he sneers, but Naruto still considers the intervention a grand success since it evidently prompts the Uchiha to sigh and start ingesting.

Less grand is how, after just a couple mouthfuls, he puts the utensils down and bites at his lip. Pushing the bowl towards safety he then proceeds to lean over the sink and hulk, not discreetly or anything but with his entire body spasming rhythmically. Naruto is beside him in an instant, identifying the vomit by smell if not by the gut-wrenching sound.

Sasuke swats him away with one hand, using the other to keep long bangs out of his face – he is disturbingly businesslike about it, calmly puking, calmly straightening and reaching for a towel to dry his mouth with, calmly washing the mess away.

Finally able to grab hold of his shoulders, Naruto forces a clearly annoyed but thankfully pliant Sasuke down on the single chair; the house is traditionally furnished for the most part, the broken table desgiend to accomodate kneeling eaters.

"What's wrong with you?" Maybe he should just run for Sakura-chan, but he doesn't want to leave Sasuke alone...

"Nothing," Sasuke replies immediately, grouchy as hell. "Or, obviously the vomiting, but, look, since you aren't sick all over the place I expect it can't be the food, so I reckon it's that – what's it called? Morning sickness?"

Yeah, like there's an illness with such a ridiculous name. The lie, however, makes a horrible suspicion dawn on Naruto. "Are you suffering from an eating disorder?"

"Wha – no! What are you _on_ about?"

"You are awfully thin," Naruto counts up his arguments slowly, eyes slitted. "And you seemed awfully used to throwing up. See, I understand it's shameful and everything, but denial clearly isn't helping, and I guess most victims are silly girls, but anyone faced with stressful circumstances can catch it and really, it's nothing to be ashamed of, we'll make you all better. The first step towards getting healthy again is to admit you have a problem and you need help." He's practically quoting Iruka-sensei word for word.

"Only," Sasuke says, giving him the bland look reserved for exceptionally thick suggestions and most frequently aimed at Kakashi-sensei and Konohamaru, "I don't need help combating an eating disorder, because, you fucking moron, I don't actually have one."

"Are you _sure_? I mean: are you really, really sure about that?"

"Listen to yourself!" Sasuke snaps at long last. "Of course I'm used to puking, I spent three years at Orochimaru's. Did you see that man's tongue? He did that to himself, voluntarily. Get my drift, dumbass?"

"Oh. Yeah. Urk. I can't believe you stayed with him."

Sasuke's shrug is light as his weight, his face smooth, his hands fisted. "We had a deal, and he fulfilled his part of it. It was only natural I paid him what I owed."

"So," Naruto asks skeptically, "you've suddenly grown morals and wouldn't have felt right just killing him if you'd been able to?"

Sasuke scowls. "Not before the joining, I don't think. Some things you just need, and if they cost you more than you'd like to pay that's too bad but there's nothing to be done about it. Like the Mangekyou. Like Orochimaru's chakra and techniques. Like the child."

Imperative knowledge plays hide and seek in Naruto's mind. He feels blindfolded, reaching on sensation alone for awareness of whose child it is, and why Sasuke clings to it, and what it all means.

"We need to be on our way or we are going to be seriously late," Sasuke says, bad-tempered and sending the tantalizing realization off into effective hiding in some unexplored crevice in Naruto's brain. There might be a lot of those, if Iruka-sensei is to be believed. "I'm going to change," Sasuke continues, adding rather snidely over his shoulder right before he closes the bedroom door behind him: "I'm not in the mood to have you peeking."

"Like I would!" Naruto yells, almost choking on his own outrage. "What do you take me for!"

"The disciple of that old pervert Sannin," Sasuke replies promptly.

"That is so not a valid argument!" Naruto protests heatedly. "It's like I would accuse you of walking around licking people for the fun of it!"

Sasuke snorts loudly, horribly snide and horrifyingly correct, comments dryly, "You weren't complaining half an hour ago."

"I – that – you are the most annoying person in the world and I don't like your face!"

"Really," Sasuke huffs in an entirely disbelieving tone, stepping out of the bedroom, cutting an impossible figure, taken out of time three years ago and magically preserved. Naruto stares (feels the hot burn of disregarded tears at the back of his eyes). It's the same slim figure the blue shirt hangs off, the same pallid muscled legs being shown off by the shorts. Except there are a few thin scars on them now, light against the whitish skin – how the hell can someone who spends as much time outside as Sasuke be so pale?

And everything is what it should have been, dark and bright and perfect, smooth and wild as instinct; and he reaches out to catch the solidity of bone and calluses, and rather to his surprise Sasuke lets him, which means he ends up with an armful of scarecrow-ish Uchiha pressed against his chest and a pair of thin, perpetually-scowling lips a chaste presence on his mouth.

Sasuke gives him a superior, scornful look Naruto is convinced all highborn children are made to practice in front of the mirror, because Neji has offered him the exact same one, only creepier due to the Byakugan. Frankly Naruto would have preferred the Sharingan, himself, which is not only cooler but also a good deal more aesthetically pleasing.

(he could laugh, because it can be this simple)

"Get changed," Sasuke mutters discontently, and callously pushes him into the bedroom.

It's a good thing they're going together, since this means Naruto will not have to suffer the extreme mockery he knows would befall him should his teammates find out he was a wee bit too excited last time to properly remember the way.

"How are you planning to cheat?" Sasuke asks him just after the building's come into view, clearly considering this shocking and rude question a reasonable conversation opener and giving Naruto terribly unwanted ideas about what dinner conversation must have been like at Orochimaru's.

"I – what?"

"The written test," Sasuke reminds him with the air of someone too exasperated to roll his eyes. "The one we're taking today? Surely you remember. If you weren't such a retard you might also recall it revolves around cheating, and as far as I know you don't really have any jutsu suited for the purpose. Which is why I'm hoping, because plainly it would be too naïve to simply presuppose, that you've worked out some kind of plan." He gives Naruto a sideways glance. "Sakura and I are not keen on failing because of your ineptitude."

"I, er, it slipped my mind, maybe?" Naruto says in a voice growing rapidly lower.

"Jesus Christ," Sasuke mutters in disgust. "You're hopeless."

Before Naruto has time to denounce this vile and ill-founded accusation a jutsu hits him between the eyes, and suddenly the world looks… subtly different. Everything's moving slower, the details are sharper, and then he sees his own dumbfounded face and squeaks.

"Sasuke you big _freak_!" (please don't let this be serious. i don't want to fight you, i can't, not for real-)

"Calm down," advises Sasuke in a horribly condescending tone of voice. "It's a simple technique that'll pass on its on in an hour or so."

"But! What's it doing, how can I be looking at myself, why's everything seem different?"

"Since you can't cheat on your own I'll simply have to do it for you. You'll be seeing the world through my eyes for the next little while: I'll use the Sharingan to copy one of the props' answers, and you'll only need to write down my answers while I look at them."

Seeing the world through Sasuke's eyes.

No wonder Sasuke's so fast, if everything else moves this slowly to his sight.

Unfortunately it's rather hard for Naruto to maneuver his own body when his eyes insist he's further ahead and a little more to the left than he actually is, and he keeps almost banging into stuff. He'll have a concussion before he's gotten the hang of this, that much is humiliatingly evident.

Besides, surely you'd say they're a couple after – after everything, and probably Sasuke won't kill him when he's mostly defenseless from the eye jutsu; stumbling forward in an awkward rush he grabs wildly for it and finds Sasuke's hand after a few frantic seconds, closes his fingers decisively around it.

"What are you doing?" Sasuke asks neutrally.

"Being a considerate boyfriend, which is more than you deserve. Also trying not to collide with anything."

"You're not my boyfriend. But fair enough," Sasuke judges and slows down.

"The hell I'm not."

"Whatever," Sasuke says with only a bit of a sneer, and doesn't tug loose even once they've entered the building and the other people stare at them, like Naruto more than half expected he would and tightened his grip to prevent. Sasuke doesn't protest this treatment either, even though he might bruise. Oddly endearing or entirely annoying, that.

They walk straight through to the right room this time, Sasuke's unfairly superior eyes easily noting the genjutsu long before they've entered it.

"It's the Sharingan ability bleeding over," Sasuke murmurs, probably tripling the whispes amongst the staring crowd by speaking practically into Naruto's ear. The procedure does, admittedly, cause a bit of a shudder and a well of very inappropriate thoughts – when did he turn into a pervert, anyway?

Okay, yeah, right around the time Neji cornered him with Sasuke's face and slipped him the tongue.

"Sasuke! Naruto! Over here!"

Sakura-chan waves at them from a corner of the room, where apparently she's conversing with Ino and Chouji. Of course, since Sasuke turned his head long before Naruto was ready for the movement and the sight hit him at a time unexpected enough to seem wrong, dizziness takes a swipe at him and he has to lean on Sasuke.

"Could you, like, not move so fast during the next hour?" he asks between gritted teeth. "How did you know where to look anyway?"

"Felt her chakra," Sasuke says, as though it should have be the most obvious thing in the world.

"I'm glad you made it," Sakura-chan says with a bit of an uncertain smile. "I was afraid for a while you wouldn't."

Naruto wonders whether this was because she thought they were killing each other or having an orgy, and also which he should hope for. This line of thought is interrupted by a rather shaky female voice announcing in a tone implying this observation might cause her a nervous breakdown, "You're – holding hands."

"Well spotted," Sasuke says dryly, to the backdrop of what Naruto now realizes is Chouji's shock-panting.

"I, um, so, like, uh," Ino says, promptly looking furious with herself and a little like she wants the ground to swallow her.

Naruto is rather sympathetic, actually – that cold, mildly disgusted look Sasuke has going on can render most anyone speechless and stuttering. He knows that from long experience, though has become relatively immune after all the practice.

After all, he decides he'd much prefer to believe she's shocked because Sasuke admittedly isn't the type to hold hands with anyone, rather than because the one clutching at him is Naruto.

"Is this relevant?" inquires a child he doesn't recognize, maybe because Sasuke isn't looking directly at her so Naruto is only able to catch a glimpse of her through the corner of one eye, her tone snotty and her eyes blank and colored a pale violet.

"Who's that?" he blurts.

The girl looks about ready to expire from sheer angry humiliation, but it's Sakura-chan who answers: "Hyuuga Hanabi, you know, Hinata's younger sister. The rest of her team isn't ready for the exam and Ino and Chouji needed another person for their group, so the three of them are taking it together."

"Oh," Naruto says. "Isn't she pretty young?"

He remembers her from the wedding, an athletic girl in an elegant red kimono, standing with her father's hand proud on her shoulder.

"I'm _almost eleven_," she claims indignantly.

"She's good," Ino says. "With the Bloodline Limit and all the special training, I guess it's no wonder. They say she's going to be the greatest Hyuuga in living memory, along with Neji."

Sasuke does give her a once-over, at that, and Naruto looks with him: she's tall for her age, about the same height as her sister, taller probably than Sasuke, lightly muscled and with the stance of someone secure in her abilities. Her hair is long and straight like Neji's, and the coldness she exudes is reminiscent of her brother-in-law as well. There is nothing of Hinata in her features, rendered bland and expressionless like those of all Hyuuga by the insect-gigantic Byakugan eyes.

"Punks!" a stranger in Chuunin attire calls then. "Time to get started."

A bit of excitement laps at him, but he's considerably calmer than he was the first time, letting go of Sasuke at the last possible instance and falling into his seat. Sakura-chan throws him a worried glance, clearly entertaining the same suspicions Sasuke did earlier, and he grins reassuringly at her, uncertain whether it calms her or not because Sasuke, inconsiderate bastard that he is, looks away, focusing on the woman to the front of the classroom.

Seems they scored a normal teacher this time around, then.

Indeed they did, and due to this, which means their scores actually matter, Naruto is decidedly grateful for Sasuke's weird and offensive jutsu. He understand nil of what the writes down, both because it's all way too theoretical for his organic way of comprehending the world and because some of the kanji are unreasonably complicated, but since he himself is not actually cheating he's obviously not caught and completes the first part of the exam with ease and excellence.

Towards the end of it his sight returns to normal, and he thanks fortune Sasuke was fast about copying the answers.

Familiar and dear is the sight of Anko, still loud and rude and showing too much chest as she leads them to the grandly titled Forest of Death.

They were tense, last time they were here – knew they were to be hunted, were prey for the older, better skilled examinees who were predators.

Naruto is laughing, this time around, and Sasuke is sufficiently untroubled to grin back at him, insult him cuttingly and briefly lean close enough for his hair to brush Naruto's face. Sakura-chan alone seems uncomfortable, gaze flickering across the surrounding woods and fingers lingering near her kunai.

She's really no good with those, but if the gesture makes her feel better Naruto won't say anything about it.

Clearly noting his glance she blushes, a short rise of pink up her cheeks. "I know it's silly, but it's just I can't help remembering last time and all the, the bad things."

"Sakura-chan," Naruto says, cowed.

Sasuke snorts. "This time we are the bad things."

The utterance seems to let her shake off at least some of her misgivings, brining healthy color back to her face. "Yes, I suppose so. I mean, yes, of course. Of course we are." She doesn't look any happier for it, although no longer exactly troubled. Just sad, a teary shine of melancholia over her eyes.

Not much farther into the forest Sasuke stops, Sakura-chan and Naruto immediately freezing as well.

"What?" Naruto hisses after a tense and entirely unproductive few seconds.

"Brats around," Sasuke explains absently. "Wisely, they're trying to hide."

Naruto would feel really bad about hunting down a bunch of scared kids, and so half hopes Sasuke will use some jutsu or other to keep their victims harmless and, more importantly, relatively unharmed.

Smiling a thin, condescending smirk so like Orochimaru's that Naruto's insides turn to knots, Sasuke… does something. A moment later, frozen involuntarily now and choking on the thick scorching darkness that feels like it's invading his every cell, clinging to his very bones and turning the world shadow-red before his eyes, Naruto belatedly recognizes the sensation of being paralyzed by _sakki_.

It's blood thirst animal and wild, senseless as consuming flames – it's intent to kill calm and deep and unruffled as a bottomless dark lake.

Moegi falls out of the bushes a few meters ahead of them, soon followed by Udon. Another handful seconds, Sasuke just calmly standing there, and Konohamaru tumbles gracelessly from a tree, hitting the ground with a groan close to his teammates.

Sasuke starts forward slow and graceful, entirely snakelike, bending softly over Konohamaru, closing a small white hand that should not have the necessary strength around the boy's collar and hefting his weight with evident ease, standing upright holding Konohamaru's dangling form in the air.

Naruto too struggles forward, agonizingly slowly through the glaring, glorying _sakki_, because Konohamaru and Moegi are both crying softly, and the trembling ghosting Konohamaru's form does not look like an attempt to escape. Well, good – Sasuke would probably wring his neck if he tried.

Moreover, Naruto is all too easily able to imagine what they see that makes them so afraid, the remembered image that burned him through and through with its chill, Sasuke's eyes slits of red madness in a demon's perfectly inhuman face, seen in The Valley at the End three years ago and now again in the Forest of Death, and damn it, Sasuke had better not be planning to honor its name.

"Hand over your scroll," Sasuke says in a reasonable, almost kind voice that makes Konohamaru sob audibly, reach beneath his cloak and all but throw the item at his captor, who catches it with the unhurried, untouchable grace that has so infuriated Naruto during all their training spars.

"Here! Take it! You can have anything you want, just please,_ please don't kill us_!"

Sasuke drops him without a word, conducting a brief visual study of the scroll. "It's the same one we have, might as well–"

At this point he is interrupted by Naruto launching himself at him, and while he neatly sidesteps the primitive assault he also stops releasing crazy amounts of _sakki._ In the blinding absence of a paralyzing world gone mad Naruto catches himself sharply and kneels over Konohamaru, who is still a wheezing tumble spread out on the ground.

"Hey," he calls, turning him over as gently as possibly. "Hey, Konohamaru, you alright?"

This touching moment is interrupted by Sasuke, who outrageously asks, "Naruto? What the hell are you doing? It was the wrong scroll, we need to move on."

"What the hell do you think _you're_ doing?" Naruto turns around to snarl. "They're kids, they're _ours_, what the fuck are you on about, doing this to them?"

"We needed to stop them," Sasuke snaps back. "I figured it would be nice if I did it without harming them, this was the simplest way, I haven't hurt a hair on their precious empty little heads!"

"Not hurt?!" Naruto cries incredulously. "They're tossed around like so much dead meat!"

"They're just scared." He'd expected Sasuke to sneer, but his tone is surprisingly even and collected, which is for some reason very upsetting.

"They're bloody terrified!"

"Yes," Sasuke agrees, and he does get angry now, words coming faster and face going colder. "So? Are you saying we never were, when we were kids? We never had to fear anything, we were constantly safe and happy and protected?"

"No," Naruto admits, still shouting. "But that was different!"

"Was it? How? I was bloody terrified all the time! I was bloody terrified when I realized I'd always be compared to Itachi and always fall short, I was bloody terrified when he murdered everyone and came for me as well! I was bloody terrified when we fought and when we didn't, and I was bloody terrified of Kakashi, he beat us up and bargained with me, and I was scared he wouldn't agree and then I was even more scared when he did, and then Orochimaru let loose his chakra on me and Sakura right here, and then I had to go to him and he did things you're too stupid and innocent to even understand, and now Itachi's dead and suddenly I'm going to have a child and I don't know what to do, and I'm terrified I'm still not good enough!"

He stands shaking faintly after the shouting has died down, looking frail and a little like he's an insane child who might crumble any second.

"Sasuke-kun…" Sakura-chan says, when the concepts of Sasuke and terrified are still bouncing around inside Naruto's mind trying to achieve some kind of new balance.

Sasuke whirls on her, looking shocked for an instant that she's present. Deceitful as a wraith he sketches what looks like an arcane kanji across her face, complicated finger-movements forming a jutsu as unfamiliar to Naruto as the name Sasuke calls a little later, voice very low. The design flares with chakra for an instant, leaving Sakura-chan's face perfectly blank, like Naruto's only seen on the dead.

"What, what did you do to her?" He'd be rushing to his feet and shaking Sasuke, were his legs not so faint with terror (what are you doing what was done to you what are you making me do).

"She doesn't need to remember over-hearing that," Sasuke explains in a preternaturally collected voice. "Neither do they."

Naruto watches him wander calmly between the fallen child-bodies, forcing memories away and leaving them lying when he's done. They end up crouching close together when Sasuke too bends over Konohamaru, and afterwards Naruto reaches across the boy's unconscious body to close his hands around Sasuke's arms.

"Hey," he says again, with a kind of desperation doing back-flops in his stomach. "You're not – you don't have to be afraid of anything alone. I'll help, you know? We can do it together, the – the child and everything. Alright?"

Sasuke looks hate at him, hate and fury and something else that's not and not easily identified. "You are a hopelessly sappy and retard idiot who were probably dropped on your head repeatedly at birth, which I assume was the natural consequence of the nurse catching sight of your gravely disfigured face, and I've never met anyone quite so completely and horrifyingly _dumb_. Alright."

Naruto smiles a little at him, dumbly as fit, glad. He also notices that Sasuke has the weirdest mouth ever: miniscule, like it's not sure it wants to be present on his face, with lips so pallid there's practically no distinction from the rest of his skin.

"Sasuke-kun? Naruto? Is everyone okay?" Snapping out of her trance, Sakura-chan hurries towards them.

"Yeah," Naruto replies, rising along with Sasuke, who drops the newly acquired and entirely useless scroll on Konohamaru's face. "Everyone's fine."

Except maybe Sasuke, but what they need to concentrate on right now is hiding the fainted children somewhere so no one takes the easy chance to get rid of them while they're out of it.

"Just," Naruto orders while they prepare to take off. "During the rest of the exam – you leave the interaction with other teams to me and Sakura-chan, you hear that, Sasuke?"

For a small wonder neither of his companions argues (sakura-chan bites unhappily at her lower lip, watching sasuke with failing covertness and with anxiety written in big letters all over her face).

Sasuke shrugs, smirks faintly. "Alright."

xxxxxxxxxx


	10. Healing Sexx0rs FTW

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 10:**

"**Healing Sexx0rs?"**

They encounter their next opponent team in what feels like no time at all, and they're adult and strangers which Sasuke supposes makes it easier. Mindful of his earlier assent, amused enough by the suggestion to be willing to keep to it until further notice, he stays to the back of their group, leaning easily against a tree trunk and watching with mild entertainment and a sprinkling of curiosity as the bunch of clones line up for battle. Even a technique as sophisticated as the Kage Bunshin no Jutsu (and how the hell did naruto with his perpetual lack of chakra control and dismal intellect master it, and so quickly?) cannot fool a fully developed Sharingan. Sasuke knows which body is real, which one he needs to watch out for in the unlikely event he'll have to step in and protect it.

Their opponents plainly consider themselves to be at a definite advantage, which admittedly is not an entirely unreasonable conclusion. Sasuke's shielding his chakra and rather clearly not intending to fight, which leaves Naruto and Sakura – a boy with the kind, open face of an idiot child, flanked by a girl, and he might not be a misogynist but he's well aware kunoichi generally don't reach the top of ninja achievement. They do look like easy victims.

However, the strangers' satisfied gleeful expressions take a noticeable downturn as Naruto starts and proceeds for quite some time to beat the living shit out of them. There's no plan to his movements, no acquired grace or stealthy skill, just furious energy and refusal to admit defeat – raw and wild, assumably partly a result of his bond to Kyuubi.

Unfortunately or otherwise Sakura's ability with regard to the whole rough and tumble bit has plainly not improved enough to merit mention, and with both of them so occupied she has no method of communicating to Naruto what she must have realized but the moron obviously hasn't.

The genjutsu is rather well made, given the limited amount of time during which it must have been constructed, but again with the Sharingan…

Still, it provides him with a good excuse to pretend ignorance, standing languid and staring into the middle distance at the fight. Only when the assailants (the real ones, not the illusion people naruto is crushing with rasengan and taijutsu) are mere feet from him does he redirect his gaze at them, and smile.

(pathetic, really)

He doesn't need his Bloodline Limit for this, nor any advanced ninjutsu.

He lifts a dainty hand to the closest man's face, almost a caress before his index and middle fingers make contact with the stranger's eyes. There's the all but forgotten sensation of slime bursting around his digits, firmer resistance as he pushes his fingers further in, all the way inside the man's head until his sharp wail is cut off, face going strangely ashen beneath the blood.

Alerted by the sound of dying, Naruto and Sakura turn hurriedly from the illusion, most of their fake opponents melting into thin air as one of their creators falls limp and dead and his companions' attention shifts from maintaining the genjutsu to charging towards Sasuke.

Given how they were admonished not to kill freely he probably should not employ any jutsu associated with him, ought not to use fire techniques or the Chidori.

He continues looking at the approaching enemy (condescending as orochimaru a thousand times in sound), hitting the stranger with a tightly leashed burst of _sakki_, sufficiently localized to impede only its intended target.

It freezes him utterly (pathetic, indeed). It is hardly worth the effort of liberating a kunai to slit his throat with. At least the thick, dense material of the stranger's shirt is good for drying the blood off the weapon.

It's a good kill, clean and efficient, impersonal and untraceable (entirely unsatisfactory).

The third man never gets to him, because Naruto hurls himself at the stranger in a clumsy blur of raging orange. Faced with the elder man's primal, wordless fear Naruto winds up sitting on his chest, apparently bent on stuffing a Rasengan down his throat.

Fast as Naruto is about the force-feeding, the jutsu doesn't explode until it is inside the man's stomach, splattering thick gore across Naruto's shocked face and front.

"Sasuke," he nevertheless calls, breathless, on his feet again with a grace Kyuubi must have lent him, because going by the greenish tint to his cheeks he should be stumbling from revulsion. "Are you alright? Are you hurt?"

The second man Naruto has killed, wilfully, brutally, with no hesitation and no possibility left for the mercy of regret, the grace of lament. He cannot ever regret anything he's done for Sasuke.

"No," Sasuke replies automatically, in the firm, short tone that comes to him as second nature. What kind of stupid question is that? He killed ANBU Jounin before he'd joined with Orochimaru, how could incompetent fools that were Chuunin level at best have done anything to him?

Obviously of the opinion Sasuke's utterance ought to be dismissed as mere bravado Naruto struggles forward, almost collapses into him, checking frantically and rather to Sasuke's dismay for damage. Upon arriving at the apparently and mysteriously baffling conclusion he has not been remotely harmed, Naruto resorts to simply looking at him, confused, lost. "I – don't understand. What with the horrible way you killed that man, I thought you were really in trouble. That they might really hurt you. But that's not how it was, is it? Were they, did they even mean to kill you?"

"I didn't wait to find out, did I?" He'd shrug, only Naruto is standing close enough that'd make their chests hitch together, and Naruto's left hand is on his shoulder, the right clinging to his elbow.

"Well you should have!" Naruto yells, strangely hushed. "It's not okay, can't you see that, it's not okay to just kill people! It's not okay to treat others so casually, not to think of them as real people!"

"Yes, I'm sure your thinking so is a great comfort to the man who ate your Rasengan!"

"That's different!" Naruto cries, tired and determined and on a note of appeal, not for agreement but for comprehension. "I thought they were _really hurting you_! And I can't have anything take you away again, not anything, I can't!"

"That makes it alright, then?" Sasuke asks, chill. "I can't kill people who attack me, but it's fine for you to do it in order to keep something you want?" I am not even touching the implication that I am something that could be yours to keep.

"No," Naruto says, sad and weary, and a little like he's talking to a child. "It doesn't make it alright. Does make it inevitable, though, which isn't okay and I get that, but I can't change it."

"And people claim Orochimaru had funny morals," Sasuke remarks, snorting, at which Naruto surges forward on an unexpected remnant of energy.

His face is intent and hurt and millimeters from Sasuke's, Naruto's weight draped over him. "It's different what you did. You didn't – there was no reason for you to kill them! You could have just as easily knocked them out. You didn't have to, there was no need for lethal force. Don't you even see it's wrong?"

Sasuke does not reason in terms of right and wrong (hasn't since a fateful day when he was eight). What matter are the pragmatic issues, the reality of consequence.

"Not particularly," he says, hears his voice come through untouched and arrogant. He does shrug a little, forcing the movement to remain unaffected by Naruto's hard warm grip and the heaviness; Sasuke has moved with the sharp grace of a warrior aristocrat for much of his life and is not about to let anything as trivial as circumstances stop him. "Tsunade said not to kill anyone, true, but she was obviously referring to our own people and possibly our allies."

Naruto looks like someone's kicked him in the face.

"He's right, Naruto. Let him go."

Sakura does not know about the Tsunade who sat drinking with Shizune and Jiraiya in a strange town far away, about the shattered woman who pulled the parts of herself together to heal a lost one's arms and regain people stolen so long since that their ghosts had firmed their hold on her years ago, or about the Tsunade who fought a duel with a child and hung a green necklace around his neck, but she knows what matters. Her voice seems to snap Naruto out of whatever haze he's slipped into enough for him to realize he's slammed Sasuke into the tree trunk, hands fisted in the expensive blue material of his shirt, and seem a little surprised about it.

"I won't let you," he declares with conviction so fierce it comes out calm, absolutely assured because Naruto doesn't know how not to believe. "I'll stop you doing anything disgusting like that."

"I'd like to see you try." Sasuke laughs, a short laugh that's ugly and a little crazy. "There isn't anyone in this world who can stop me." (_including me_)

"Fuck you," Naruto sneers, and swipes at him.

Sasuke ducks with the languid grace of a dancer utterly in control of his movement. He does not need the sharp needlepoint turns of a ninja, not with the Bloodline Limit eyes and a body so thoroughly trained that it employs chakra to aid its movements automatically.

Naruto's fist penetrates the wood with a vicious thud.

"Sasuke!" Sakura screams. "For god's sake, you're pregnant!"

Sasuke bends to the side lazily, catching Naruto's arm in his hand.

Clearly noticing that her appeal fell on willfully deaf ears, Sakura turns towards more persuadable audiences.

"Naruto, for god's sake, he's pregnant!"

Naruto does stop, standing still and so tense he's shaking a little. Not enough to be visible, just sufficiently for Sasuke to sense the fine tremors in the arm he's holding.

"I meant it," Naruto says, staring into Sasuke's eyes as intently as though he thought he could reach what semblance of soul Sasuke might have left through them. "I'm going to help, and we're going to make you better."

He kisses him then, and Sasuke is startled and itchy and lets him.

"Sure," he sarcasms, irony so thick it becomes a verb. "You're going to heal me with the miraculous power of your penis."

Naruto blushes but doesn't move, his mouth still hovering over Sasuke's, his face still painted over with that cracking guilelessness, that stupid hero's mask. Sasuke can't stand it, opens his mouth, maybe to complain, maybe for the wet slide against Naruto's.

"Jesus!" Sakura complains, more exasperated than amused. "Get a room!"

"Room?" Naruto asks, and maybe the fact he seems so dumb all the time is simply innocence from having been spared contact with people for most of his life. "What for?"

"To fuck in private, you idiot," and he only remembers words such as _fuck_ aren't spoken in Leaf when the other two give him alarmed looks midway between startled and disgusted and amused. Jesus Christ, you've never visited the real world, have you?

Refusing to shake his head (_that's plebeian, sasuke, you're of good birth, you should know better. look at your brother, he always acts properly_) he kicks the closest corpse, rolls it onto its back. Searching bodies is a task more suited for underlings, but what do you do? And, when Naruto sees what he's doing, he too swallows and crouches over the other stranger, fingers tumbling fast across his clothes with something akin to panic, and minutes later he brandishes the required scroll with dulled triumph.

"Finally," Sakura sighs (seemingly entirely undisturbed by the bodies. then again, with her lack of skill survival instinct becomes more important). "Let's get to the tower now, no more interruptions, please?" She adds, on a note of a mother bribing her children with candy and with a bit of a mischievous gleam that she must have inherited from Tsunade: "There are rooms there."

Sasuke expects they've set a new record regarding arrival time – apparently the examinees aren't supposed to make their way to the goal in under two hours, and the exam commenced only forty minutes ago. If Orochimaru's Daily Dinnertime Speeches About Upcoming World Domination And General Evil Schemes Mainly Centered On Perverse Experimentation had not long since given him immunity to its strains, Sasuke would be worried about the tediousness about to savage them (everything hidden, threatening to surface in the wake of distraction).

"Well?" Sakura says then, pink eyebrow halfway up her forehead. "Rooms aplenty. Are you going to…?"

Sasuke spares a moment to be startled that her earlier suggestion was evidently quite serious. He wets his lips: she might have a point. Raising an eyebrow too, in inquiry, he turns his face minutely towards Naruto.

"I, what, you like – _meant it_? I mean, you meant it _for real_, here?" Gods, Sasuke isn't the only deviant around. When did Sakura-chan turn into a dirty sex fiend?

On the other hand, judging by how the idea affects him, that probably just means she fits in perfectly, and their teamwork is splendid: she suggests they have sex, Sasuke plainly isn't turning the idea down, and Naruto himself is about to agree. He didn't exactly plan on losing his virginity in the tower of the Forest of Death, but according to his lust-drenched mind anywhere's good so long as Sasuke's there (i'd laugh, only it isn't really funny).

He didn't plan on killing a man today (or that other day).

(i didn't plan on losing sasuke three years ago)

"Don't have a heart attack," Sasuke dismisses, with only a streak of cold marring the disinterested demeanor he presents to the world. "If you don't want to, fine."

"Yeah," Naruto agrees. "That would have been great." Would have spared them all a lot of embarrassment, at least. "Problem is I do want you, you _know_ that!" In view of recent circumstances there can hardly be any doubt in Sasuke's mind, and it's just like the bastard to nevertheless make Naruto spit it out in front of people.

"Excellent," Sasuke says, and his girl's fingers are slender and cool around Naruto's wrist.

Not fancying the idea of doing the dirty in front of Sakura-chan, Naruto willingly stumbles along, up a staircase and through the first doorway.

Sasuke's face is coldly indecipherable, possibly carrying a smudge of distaste around the corners of the mouth, but his eyes are hooded and making Naruto wonder for a second time if it's possible to die due to the rush of blood away from his head.

"Oh," Naruto says, and swallows, drawing Sasuke in close slowly, inexorably, feeling the tense warmth under his hands, against his body (and i'm trying to frame the appropriate words in language, staring love at sasuke like something starved).

Then, to his strangely abstracted bleak horror, Sasuke sneers at him. A haughty, chilly expression of dislike.

"It means nothing," Sasuke confides, right against his mouth. "It's just sex. It doesn't have anything to do with emotion."

"_Fine_," Naruto snarls, furious with Sasuke, furious with himself, because though his heart might be broken it's thudding insistently, mad, and maybe he is truly crazy, for he doesn't pull away. Grabs harder, instead, closing his hands bruising around Sasuke's arms, his shoulders, his hips.

If there's no emotion, sensation will just have to suffice, won't it?

Lust and ownership and hatred, anger and grief and love, spiraling crazy through him; and he holds Sasuke against the wall, feels clawing fingers at his neck and bites at an exposed throat.

There are several scars on it already, two sets of teeth marks, mirroring one other perfectly on each side of the neck. When his own teeth close over one of them, to make the scar his own, place his own tag there (like sasuke were a graffiti wall) Sasuke shudders sharply in his arms, a breathy sound that's all desperation exploding out of him. Next second, confused and feverish or not, his kick costs Naruto his footing.

He ends up sprawled on the floor, Sasuke spread out over his lap, Sasuke who doesn't touch without purpose but is all over him: must want Naruto's hands everywhere.

(most of sasuke consists of bone-pipes shrouded in skin, with a bit of muscle here and there, the breasts the only softness) Sasuke's stomach is morbidly, wonderfully fascinating to Naruto – the idea there can be life there, something growing inside the hardness and asceticism, for if Sasuke's beautiful it's a Spartan beauty.

Thought is long gone when Sasuke slaps his hands away, not willing to let them linger on his abdomen, and Naruto doesn't mind because let's face it, compared to some things stomachs aren't very interesting. Like, for instance, Sasuke's quick sure hands inside his pants, or the inseam of Sasuke's thighs.

And despite everything, Sasuke's words and betrayals that never seem to end, Naruto can appreciate how he is welcomed to rest a sweat-slick forehead against Sasuke's shoulder, mouth opening and closing experimentally over his skin, and the muted sounds like those of animals, and how Sasuke moves a certain way, right now, and everything in the world is lightning curling through my body, owning me up utterly.

Reality returns in bits and pieces, afterwards: Sasuke's heat pressed against him, moving still in apparent urgency, kissing him hungry as famine.

Face burning, from how humiliatingly beautiful Sasuke is and how stupid he must seem, releasing when he was just barely sheathed – and Sasuke clenches above him, bites Naruto's mouth against what is clearly a scream.

Naruto's arms wrap around him again, hands softer now, fingers sweeping slow and exploring over neck and into hair and he thinks, after all, I love you.

"That was that, then," Sasuke mutters, extracting himself with the creepy grace of a snake and bending for his clothes. "Come on, get up. We need to go back downstairs."

The fuck?

xxxxx

Tsunade goes herself to greet the old Team Seven in the tower, because it would be so starkly pointless to send a Chuunin. What could he say, an older man probably and bent under his duties and inadequacy, faced with a bubble-bright demon host and a pregnant boy, both of whom killed people more skilled than he when they were still children?

Iruka might have been an option, except Iruka is not allowed anywhere near them. He's too kind, always was, and the sight of Naruto falling to pieces, slowly and inevitably, chunk after chunk of his vitality dying away, broke him from the boy's side. He could not bear to see it, though face it he must, in memory if nowhere else, the sparkling grin with progressively less honesty behind it, until it was as hollow as the eyes below which it was situated.

For Iruka is kind, stupidly childishly helplessly kind, and so those who are not shield him to have something to measure their harsh strength and adultness against in times of trial – he is not to go near Uchiha Sasuke.

On the pretence they have nothing better to do, missions being typically sparse during the conduction of the exam, several Jounin accompany their Hokage.

Kakashi walks to the back of the group, ready to intervene should he need to: Sasuke might be fast but Kakashi won't be fooled twice, and the kid's not getting away with anything funny.

He's also walking to the back of the group because that's been his place since he snapped and broke almost all of Gai's bones two years ago.

(you don't talk about sasuke. take a hint or take a firm shutting up)

They took the Chuunin Exam together, years ago, he and Gai and a dead ANBU he's forgotten the name of. Kakashi was six, splendid and arrogant and trying to be tough and cynical like he'd seen the older boys be. Then they ran into a pack of Grass ninja who took things a fair bit too seriously, and he killed one of them and it was the first time he'd ever taken a life, and after that he was shell-shocked and didn't have to pretend adultness anymore. Didn't want it anymore either, but that didn't save him.

Gai was ten and as insufferable then as now, though he quieted after Kakashi had killed a man and the ANBU-to-be another.

He remembers the Fourth's hand on his shoulder, afterwards, his head so close to the ground it seems in retrospect he must have been looking at the man's kneecaps. Silver hair was tussled (and he spotted gai farther away, and no one had ever ruffled that horrible black mane).

"Sakura," Tsunade says ahead of him, and the girl jumps up to greet them, a nervous flush darkening her skin. "Where's the rest of your team?"

"They, er," she chews on her lower lips, throws a desperate glance at Kakashi. "Went to a different part of the tower. Yes. Exactly."

"Is that so?" Tsunade replies, expressionless. "Where to? I except we shall have to find them."

"Er. That is, um. I really don't, don't think you want to do that. Uh, right now. I mean, don't want to do that right now."

"Why is that?" Tsunade asks, pulling off a voice altering between amused and dangerous.

Kakashi can't see the point of Sakura's caution: whoever's dead will still be dead later, and then there's the smell and the not looking like he's only sleeping anymore.

"Because, because," Sakura temporizes, increasingly red in the face. At last, and good for her because an eye as trained as Kakashi's sees at once Tsunade's seconds away from smacking her, she bursts out: "Because they're having sex!"

Kakashi would peg Asuma as the one to voice the shocked intake of breath, and the low, startled chuckle sounds like Kurenai's. Tsunade, of course, stays true to long habit and is not nearly so discreet.

"Excellent," she says, and Sakura winces before realizing her Hokage is not being at all sarcastic. "How come? Fill me in on the details."

"Well," Sakura starts uncertainly. "Um. There was all this tension, and that's not so strange, but the shapes it took were new. I mean, they always fought, and sure, Naruto stared an awful lot when I first undressed Sasuke to heal him, but I figured that was just – shock and curiosity. But then I, I sort of walked in on them kissing yesterday," and it's clear from her circumspect tone and brilliant flush that kissing isn't exactly the right word, but she's not uttering the correct phrase in front of adults she respects, "and all through the exam they were hopeless, so when we finally got here I, that is, I might have slightly implied it might not be an entirely stupid idea that they get it out of their systems and, and I expect that's what they're currently doing. Um, yeah."

"Excellent," Tsunade repeats. "Perfect. How long have they been at it?"

"Uh…"

"I'm trying to determine whether I'd rather wait around or come back later," Tsunade clarifies.

"Oh, right! Sorry! Um, they started off perhaps twenty-thirty minutes ago. I figure they'll be, be finished anytime." She looks briefly away, the redirects her gaze at Tsunade's chin. "If you don't mind me asking, why's it good that they're – being close?"

Tsunade shrugs (as if the answer is so obvious it's not worth obscuring). "Naruto is ours," she says. "And Sasuke is young, and liking people might still mean something to him, and anything that ties him harder to Leaf is to be promoted."

Kakashi doubts that, actually (about the liking meaning anything much to sasuke – should think he cured the kid of that before orochimaru ever touched him).

Thing is that this is Naruto, and liking isn't the appropriate term of phrase.

"I suppose," Sakura says in the low, absent voice that declares she's being introspective and should not be disturbed.

Somewhere close by, apparently Naruto and Sasuke are doing the dirty.

Kakashi toys with the idea of being relived he is not surprised, but it is an exercise in futility. Naruto's important to him, of course he is, but – but he walked into Sakura's bedroom two days ago and Sasuke was there, half-naked and vulnerable and annoyed. Every bit as sullen and untouchable as he was three years ago, and with eyes dark from too much knowledge now and stark white curves. The sharp jutting of his shoulders, the languid slope of his collarbones, the miniscule perfected arc of his bosom.

He's seen them, and has awake-dreamed about feeling them often enough his fingers sometimes burn with the imagined memory, of touching lightly as though he were caressing a baby bird, the only way Sasuke can be touched. Insubstantial as a lost fantasy, because too much contact would make everything hard.

The furious pride and the shallow arrogance that were his, the helplessness and the neuroses, the soft uncertain wanting to be seen; the idea he must shape himself to fit and master reality, and the unquenchable grim willfulness that shapes reality around his person (all the ideals he wanted to compromise but couldn't).

Just Sasuke, this strange alienated traumatized little brat, who shouldn't be grown up now but is, whom Kakashi is turning his face sideways to watch walking down the stairs behind him.

The clothes look no different on the pregnant woman than they did on the boy pretending desperately he didn't require anyone's attention or approval in a wild bid at getting them, but the face is calmer and finer.

A few steps behind him, fumbling with his jacket and trying to get a coherent sentence out, is Naruto, who quiets abruptly and blinks at the assembly.

"Er," he says. "Um, hello?"

"Hello," Kakashi says, soft and unruffled (smiles, wide enough it's visible through the mask). "Have a good time?"

Naruto blushes and Sasuke snorts. He's not coloring this time, which makes all the sense in the world partly because he's been embarrassed so often by now he has to be getting used to it, and partly because Kakashi knows Sasuke is shy until he knows you want him, after which he's perfectly willing to show himself off.

"Ah, I see you're back." Tsunade's voice. "Come on, we're going to the hall; the last ones will arrive shortly."

Surprisingly fast, but it was a small bunch of prospective Chuunin this year, mostly only Leaf Genin, and they should be either dead, disqualified or close to the tower by now (we've been monitoring the forest more closely after the orochimaru incident three years ago and know when to expect the kids).

His trio stays to the back this time, Sasuke looking spoiled and unimpressed, Sakura a little amused and a little worried, Naruto crest-fallen, uncertain, angry, hurt and almost scared as he tries continuously to get a real response from Sasuke.

Konohamaru and his cronies stagger in last, all of them wearing faces pinched and pallid, moving with the careful flight-readiness of people who have seen things they ought really to have been spared.

Minutes later, from another door, slips a Chuunin who whispers briefly to Tsunade. Kakashi reads his lips with ease: Everyone who's coming is here. Seven dead: the entire elder Rock team, two members of the younger party from Country of Lightning, and the Mist village and Kurenai's new team lost a person each.

"Alright," Tsunade declares briskly. Her priorities are different from her predecessor's, she knows that and always has, and so no one ought to be surprised she doesn't give the kids a month to improve. "The last matches will begin tomorrow," she informs. "Be on time."

Sasuke starts for the exit at once, walking fast, and Naruto scrambles after him, cursing under his breath and apologizing left and right as he knocks into people who stepped away to leave room for the Uchiha, unwilling to touch the mean sickliness he exudes. He's almost caught up when he stumbles across Konohamaru, and knows he should stop but doesn't, until the boy closes a hesitant hand around his wrist.

"Naruto-niisan," he says, solemn and a bit like he might pee his pants from residual horror, and they're all looking at him, and fine, I'll have to corner Sasuke later.

"Yeah," he says, and, making his voice softer: "What is it? You guys feeling better now?"

Moegi still looks about ready to cry, ready for those silent tears that just stream unobtrusively, too despaired to demand attention.

This sight is what makes him realize for the first time he's not exactly a child anymore. He also recognizes, belated and surprised, that that makes a real difference, that Konohamaru's generation has never needed to see anything truly horrible. There have been no wars, no true tragedies. They didn't even have to witness Orochimaru's attack, hidden safely away. Not like Naruto who was scorned all his life, lived with the lingering present-ness of the Kyuubi Tragedy and the Uchiha Tragedy, who stumbled into an A-rank mission he couldn't really handle, had his teacher push him down a ravine to master a power, who saw Gaara kill without emotion and then fought him, and lost his best friend to something that might be as bad as death or worse (no, no, not that).

(won him back?)

Naruto with all of this in him and Sasuke with his blood-drenched past sometimes thought, if never said, that protected Sakura-chan had some things to learn about absorbing shocks and moving on through them, but she was better at it than Konohamaru's group appears to be (or maybe sasuke and he were just strong enough to carry her with them, and there isn't a hardened one in group konohamaru).

Konohamaru nods now, though. "Yeah," he says. "But – wasn't that, I mean, that was the traitor, right? The Uchiha who turned. Why's he, how can he be back and treated like everything's normal when he does things like that?"

"Shut your mouth about Sasuke," Naruto has commanded in a voice too sharp for him to recognize it as his own before he's even fully absorbed the words. "You don't understand. You don't know anything about him!"

Moegi and Udon look taken aback, but Konohamaru replies heatedly, "I know he used some kind of psycho murder power on us! Hardly the behavior of a good guy!"

"The behavior of a good ninja!" Naruto snaps back, angry because basically he agrees. "We were on opposite sides, and he didn't hurt you."

"Leader…!" Shock and betrayal in the word, and Naruto can't stay here, where he can't decide whether he'd rather shut Konohamaru up forcefully or beat the crap out of Sasuke for causing this whole mess in the first place.

Of course, if Naruto hadn't been too blind to see what was going on three years ago, hadn't been too weak and pointless to stop it, there wouldn't be a problem. He has some practice not letting that thought consume him, though.

"Just," he says, not kindly. "Don't talk about him, alright? Stay out of his way." He turns away from the pained, incredulous faces. "I have to go."

Sakura turns from her involved conversation with Ino to watch him hurry outside, but sighs and decides whatever's between him and Sasuke isn't her business, and the resultant frustration is mixed with a shameful touch of relief.

xxxxxxxxxx


	11. The Things Without Form

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 11:**

"**Things Without Form"**

Sasuke thinks he must be getting old, because previously his method of choice for distracting himself and calming down has always been to train until he's too exhausted for thought, yet tonight he's cleaning the dishes instead. Warm water scorches his hands, turning their skin a garish red, and the pots and pans are smooth solidities under his fingers, firmness against his palms.

Fighting someone until his heart can ease its pounding because the opponent's pulse has stopped, struggling until he's vomiting from sheer exhaustion – he knows it's a workable way of handling things, but he can't be immature anymore, with too little time left until he has to be a parent, and he's so sick of puking he has no words for it.

He can't risk the child, and if Sakura is to be believed that means he has to gain quite a bit of weight. Which entails less training, more eating and a bid at minimizing the retching.

He refuses to look up from the dishwater when the door opens and closes and Naruto's familiar steps sound behind him. Rather predictably the idiot doesn't stop short of invading Sasuke's personal space, but at least they aren't touching.

With the memories pushing at him, demanding attention and rumination, he feels too raw to handle that.

But he must yield to them with bad grace, because there are worse thoughts waiting, and rather Naruto than Itachi.

…and it's there at once, immediately present again and crowding his mind, the spiral of feeling rising, red and brilliant – the expected sensation of arousal, marginally different when filtered through a girl's body but known and manageable. The emotions can shift, he knows that: fear and excitement and something childish and betrayed dying inside him with Kakashi, revulsion and rage and determination with Orochimaru, more determination and a bleak listlessness with Itachi.

Changed today into something aching furiously inside him, as though needing to be soft but denied this. Sasuke was strong once in the way that means you break if forced to bend enough in a certain way, but everything brittle and inadaptable has been torn away, and there is no room left for anything but hardness so immense it must shatter completely if it does not hold (he was soft once, he supposes, as children are, only that wasn't me, not really).

He wishes Naruto would leave him alone with the dishes and the hot water and the repeated motion of washing.

Orochimaru is laughing at him inside his head: _Sasuke-kun, aren't you the sweetest child? You know he fancies he loves you, he has to, and you – you couldn't actually have thought you might be able to handle that, could you? There's nothing left in you that's soft enough to love._

Emotion has to be fierce, unforgiving, to break through the layers of dull indolence wrapped around him; and there are things Orochimaru could never begin to comprehend, but Sasuke isn't a people person and Naruto's hand laid out on his back, fingertips curving around his shoulder, leaves him starkly uncomfortable.

At least when they were having sex he knew what Naruto meant to accomplish with the touches, knew how to handle their results.

"Hey," Naruto says, light and uncertain, sounding brittle. "You eat already?"

"No," Sasuke replies after some consideration. He's washing up the dishes left from breakfast.

(for the eighth time, but there's not need to mention that)

"Good," and he can hear the smile despite the tension. "I was afraid I'd have to try and cook for myself."

"I'm not your housekeeper," Sasuke says, scrubbing furiously at a bowl. "Anyway, you seemed to get by fine up until now."

"Well, yeah," Naruto admits, and there's a sound indicating he scratches the back of his head with the hand not still lying on Sasuke's ribs. "But it's much farther to the Ichiraku from here."

Sasuke makes a non-committal noise and rescues his sodden hands from the sink, reaching past Naruto for a towel.

"Look, I talked to Konohamaru before. Um…"

"Yeah? I really don't care."

What passes through Naruto's mouth upon this utterance is quite clearly intended to be a laugh but sounds all wrong for it, choked and small. "Is there anything you care about? Really care about, I mean." Light sarcasm fails him, leaving the question bleak and rather horrifying.

"One or two things."

"Jesus Christ!" Naruto exclaims at length. "Be any more enigmatic and you'll turn mute!"

"I note at least your talent for stupidity has increased over the last years," Sasuke says, and before Naruto can yell anything back he starts explaining for reasons mercifully unexplored, sentences clumsy and indirect, not what he wants to say though he supposes they get the message across: "You have a certain ambition, dumb though it may be, something you promised to do, promised yourself to, and just imagine that being gone, imagine your futile Hokage-quest as part of the past, and–"

"It is," Naruto interrupts, looking more sad than uncomfortable, which is a first, and offering a smile too weary to seem his. "I made my promise of a lifetime, and it wasn't about that. That was – just a stupid symbol, you know? A childish way of saying I wanted certain people to recognize me. And I realized that, after there didn't seem to be a point to it anymore, because even if I got that I knew I wouldn't be able to have what I was really after, and so I… I just promised Sakura-chan I'd bring you back. That was it."

Sasuke wishes he had never turned away from the dishes. They were so much easier to face than this. Finally he says, contemplative: "Are you aware you talk about me the same way Orochimaru did?"

Naruto makes a sound of outrage and utter denial.

"Oh, but you do. You're constantly referring to me as something you have to keep, something you lost and needed to reclaim and won't let go of again. Something that exists for you to have."

"That's not…" Naruto's hand on him firms in something like desperation, a guilty twitch to its fingers.

"I'm not saying it's unnatural," Sasuke clarifies, calmly (they've all been the same way, my parents and the girls and my teachers). "I'm not even necessarily saying I mind."

"I mind!" Naruto cries, grabbing at his shoulders until Sasuke looks up at him, which was probably the intention. "I don't want to – I'm not like him!"

"I never claimed you were."

"Hell, Sasuke, you didn't exactly need to."

He shrugs, freeing himself – Naruto tenses for a second, then lets go with a sigh, gaze taking a trip to the floor. Deciding he might as well start dinner, Sasuke turns his back on the terrible conversation and begins drying the necessary dishes.

"When I talked to Konohamaru," Naruto says at last, and Sasuke pointedly slams a pot down on the counter, which the idiot ignores. "It was so weird, because I realized I was defending your actions, and that he couldn't understand because he's just a little kid, but when we were that age – it was way different. But, uh, the point was I saw your point. You were right, you didn't actually hurt them, and I still think you could have been nicer about it but maybe it was for the best."

"Should I take it you're implying a touch of blinding fear was educational for them?"

"Yes. No. That's – I mean I guess in one way it's wonderful they could grow up so protected they're still shocked when someone attacks them, but if they're planning to be ninja they have to understand that that's not how the real world works, and the sooner the better, or they're going to get seriously hurt."

"You have no idea how the real world works," Sasuke says, and he meant it as a tease, an insult, but it comes out soft and wistful (jealous of innocence he couldn't stand having). It's so frustrating how Naruto makes him make no sense.

"How does the real world work, then?" Naruto asks, as though curious about Sasuke's thought process rather than the answer, but it hardly matters.

"I didn't kill Itachi because I was in the right," Sasuke says, measured and attending to the boiling water. "It wasn't because I'd tried hard, or because I was a better person or a better ninja. I killed him because I used dirty tricks and I'd sold my soul to the devil. That's how the real world works."

(he adjusts his sleeve, saving it from a watery fate)

"What Orochimaru did for me wasn't for free. I did sell him my soul, if not my body, and gods know I loaned that to him often enough."

"What do you mean, loaned it to him?" It's a choked demand, hardly recognizable as Naruto's voice.

He shouldn't reply, of course (at the very least not with the truth). However, 'should' has hardly ever applied to his relationship with Naruto.

"I did what he told me to do," he says, evenly, defiant. "He trained me, he beat me up, he fucked me, used me, infiltrated me every way he could. And you know what? I knew it, and I used him too, and it had to be worth it! Even if I'd known from the beginning what he'd do, what he'd claim as advance payment, I would've needed to go to him all the same, because I needed the power and I still do. I never wanted him in me, but there it is, I didn't have any other worthwhile choice and I can't regret it." He releases the spoon before it snaps between his fingers. "That's what the real world is like."

"What?" Naruto hisses, husky and shocked. "That's _disgusting_! What did he, why did you let him, how could! Is," he swallows audibly. "Is the child his?"

"I believe you heard me the first time," Sasuke ticks off the first question, too angry now to care about truth being dangerous, still fiddling with the pot. "I didn't let him: I just wasn't strong enough to stop him. How could what? It happened in much the same way we happened earlier today, I'm sure you remember. And don't be more stupid than you can help, this is the third day of the pregnancy and Orochimaru's body died almost two weeks ago."

"Thank god," Naruto mutters distinctly under his breath. His face, its reflection glimpsed in the sparkling clean metal pot, goes soft and hurt, uncertainty and determination written along its every line. "Sasuke," he says, the word some kind of unanswerable prayer, his hands returning to Sasuke's shoulders, gentle and insistent, opting to turn him around. Having never hesitated to face the retard head-on before and refusing to start now, Sasuke allows himself to be pulled towards Naruto after an initial instant of instinctive refusal. He ends up with Naruto's arms hard around him, crushed into Naruto's chest, Naruto's voice mumbling shaky into his ear. Nothing truly coherent, simply… reassurances, his name and apologies and sympathy (pity and rage).

"I'm not some fucking victim," Sasuke says, crisp and hoping this is an unnecessary statement. "I was a consenting participant of the basic bargain."

"I thought you only just now said you didn't let him," Naruto says in a voice that trembles on the fine line between jarring and growling.

Sasuke shrugs, pissed but not uncontrollably so.

Naruto's chest hitches with impending upset words.

Placing a palm flat against it and pushing a little bit away, far enough to look Naruto in the face, Sasuke forestalls him, "It's not as though he was the first who wanted something in return. Everything has a price, and it might be higher outside but things still cost you here."

"What do you mean?" Naruto asks, sharp. "Our teachers never–"

Sasuke gives him a smirk because if he can't maintain the façade of ironic superiority he's going to break something. "Can you honesty tell me Jiraiya trained you for free? He didn't demand anything in return? Little bit of naked, mayhaps?"

"What are you suggesting?" Naruto asks, horrified. "He never touched me! I mean, sure, I did some Oiroke no Jutsu transformations for him, but it wasn't anything serious!"

"No, it wasn't," Sasuke agrees amiably. "He just made a twelve year old child parade around nude for him so he could get himself off remembering it. That's not sick, that's not to take advantage."

It is clear enough Naruto has never given any thought to this interpretation of Jiraiya's behavior, and he spares a moment to let his brow furrow in surprised distaste before continuing, "He never hurt me. He never – it's not comparable."

"No," Sasuke agrees again. "I suppose it's not. He never did know how to get properly paid, the soft-hearted stupidity."

"That's not you talking," Naruto declares, clearly distraught and fighting with himself about whether to let go of Sasuke. "You've hardly even met him, you can't know anything about him."

Sasuke feels like a skull when he grins: grins not because he wants to but because his face shapes itself into a smirk as though on someone else's command (and i know whose force that has to be, crush the parasite down but not before the grin is already stretched hard across my taut features). "Everything Orochimaru knew wasn't false."

"So," Naruto gestures helplessly. "What? You think everyone who helps someone for free is stupid?"

"Yes," Sasuke replies blandly. "Which I assume is why no one ever does, not really."

"That's not true," Naruto claims with determination. He probably even believes himself, if the upset flush is any indication. Stupid fucking innocent.

"And who ever did anything for nothing?" Sasuke asks. "Who ever took care of you or shielded you when you were small? You were just a little kid, you were helpless and innocent, and was there a single person who protected you?" He shrugs. "No one did anything for me either, not without wanting something in return. My father wanted a better, more obedient son to take Itachi's place, my mother wanted harmony so she wouldn't have to deal with anything, Itachi wanted someone who didn't look at him as only a genius. None of them would have given me the time of day if they hadn't believed I could give them that, repay them." Sasuke would not have allowed this realization, but Orochimaru had it, and it's merciless and painful now it's undeniable fact, years too late to change anything.

(_that's what i sold my soul for? _

_no, i sold it for myself. _

_to never need anyone else ever again_)

Fusing with Orochimaru has definitely loosened his tongue. Perhaps it's just as well; he knows as well as anyone, better perhaps than most, that Naruto is not great with subtlety or reading between blurred lines.

"And Team Seven? Don't make me laugh. Kakashi took care of us because it was his job, he officially got paid for it. He never even tried with Sakura, and I'm not saying it was the wrong decision, he never even tried with her because he knew it wasn't worth his while and she had nothing to offer in return."

The argument forming on Naruto's lips is easy to read long before it is spoken, and Sasuke decides he might as well trash it at once.

"Tried with me?" he says. "Oh, certainly he tried with me. Only it wasn't for me, it wasn't even about me – I was his fucking salvation, his way to redeem his own ruined past. He saw himself in me, and it was himself he was trying to save!"

"But we helped each other!" Naruto cries.

"Sakura would have done anything for me because she wanted me for herself. If she tried hard enough, maybe I'd notice. She did what little she could for you because she could not have lived with herself if she'd just watched you die when she could have helped. It was all about her gain, her peace of mind. It had nothing to do with us." He snorts, scornful but not judgemental. "You tried for her because you wanted her, same way she wanted me, and of course you'd have liked for me to be in your dept!"

Astonishingly, creepily, the expression of heated denial melts off Naruto's face, leaving one of serene triumph.

"There's still you, though" Naruto says. "You did."

"What exactly are you claiming I did?" Voice carefully tired and lacking avid interest.

"You traded your life for mine," Naruto says. "In Country of the Wave. You must have been convinced you'd die if you shielded me, and yet you did, and after you're dead you can hardly earn anything. So it was for free, all heroic and unselfish and everything you claim you don't believe in."

"I," Sasuke says at last, after discarding all the soundless words his mouth shapes. "That's a stupid thing to bring up."

"Why did you do that?" The stupid blueness of Naruto's stupid eyes is stupidly endless.

_Because I loved you hopelessly_.

_Because I was a child, and I was in love without realizing, and you were there_.

_Because I thought you were the only thing that didn't come with a price tag, that maybe all you'd demand in exchange for you was me._

Because, and he hates it but it is, it's all about us.

"Let go of me," he says. "The water's boiling, I need to take it off the stove."

"_Sasuke_!"

Sasuke hits him. It's not a particularly hard hit, just a sharp simple slap snapping Naruto's hands from their new position on his shoulders and gracing Naruto's face in passing.

"Shut up," he orders, darkly as he hasn't spoken since he left Sound, but what was that but a pathetic illusion? "I'm not Uchiha Sasuke of Leaf anymore. I'm only halfway the person you thought you knew, don't you dare impose on me."

Naruto looks like a child who's just been told his mother's dead, like he did at first in The Valley at the End – faced with a horror too great to be comprehensible, praying it's not real.

"You're still you," he claims. "That can't change. You're Sasuke." Desperation, despair, because he has to believe this, not because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate but because _there is no other option_. "You're Sasuke and_ I_ _bloody well love you_!"

He looks horrified at what he's said, but not about to take it back.

"Your Sasuke doesn't exist anymore."

"What are you talking about?" Naruto snarls. "You're right here!"

Sasuke shakes his head a little, a lofty, untouched movement. "You've turned stupidity into an art," he says. "Color me impressed." He can feel his face harden, the expression of contempt freezing in place; the mask is brittle protection for the real emotions poking at it from beneath. "Three years normally change people. Three years with living conditions so drastically altered and incorporating such an amount of defining events definitely do. Most particularly, having another person's mind stuffed into your head makes you not the same person anymore! There's no way to remain who you were before that!"

"But you have," Naruto insists. "Hell, I'm not saying you haven't changed, and I'm not saying I approve of all the changes, but I can't think of anything in the world that could make you not you!"

"I can," Sasuke says. "I am me. That's not the same as being the person who left Leaf three years ago. You need to understand that."

"Look," Naruto says. "The Valley at the End – you tried to kill me. I mean really tried, you would have done it if you'd had the opportunity during the fight. That didn't change who you were, or how I feel about you. If that didn't, it seems ludicrous to even imagine a pathetic asshole like Orochimaru could."

"He did," Sasuke replies, evenly. "Because I didn't kill you then, I couldn't kill you then, but I think I would have now."

"Do you want to? Go ahead and try!"

"I don't. I won't."

"Why not?"

"Because I'd succeed, and I don't want that!"

"Why's that, then? You tell me how annoying I am all the time, and apparently you're convinced it'd be easy for you. Why the hell aren't you trying it right now?"

"It'd earn me nothing. And, and I don't want to. I don't want to kill you and I don't want you dead at all!"

"Why don't you?" demands Naruto, who can apparently be merciless after all.

"Because that'd mean he's won!" Sasuke erupts.

"Orochimaru wants you to kill me?" Naruto sounds justifiably skeptical.

"No," Sasuke sneers furiously. "But if I killed you for no reason at all then that'd mean I didn't care anymore, and then I'd be more him than me, and then he'd have won!"

They appear both to realize what he's actually saying a few startled seconds later: _I'm not me if I don't care about you. One of the qualities defining me is the inability to kill you, to choose a reality without you in it._

And he's furious and still terrified and Orochimaru is a pounding red-dark headache inside his mind, and for a second reality blurs, gaps opening. He redistributes his weight, feels Naruto's solidity, is positively blinded by the orange glare of his jacket, the dumb blueness of his eyes.

Behind him the water boils over with an audible splashing sound that turns into hissing as the liquid hits the heated stove.

It saves the both of us: Sasuke turns around and rescues the pot from the stove, Naruto cursing in the background as, presumably, he manages to get burned.

"Look," Sasuke starts when the crisis has been appropriately, in inexpertly, handled; he hasn't cooked in years.

Show, don't tell, huh?

Well, this is, incredibly, Naruto.

Sasuke takes the other's unresisting hand and presses it quite deliberately to his breast; stares at him with the Mangekyou Sharingan in his eyes and _sakki_ whispering around them, more an echo of the sensation than anything else, but undeniable and present the same way a shadow is – immaterial but inescapable. "Does this seem like the person you knew?"

It's a kinslayer Naruto's groping, and a girl, that has to be exceptionally apparent to him. Frail bones and occasional softness that the Sasuke of three years ago would never voluntarily have assumed, a vicious lethality that the Sasuke of three years ago had not achieved.

(a girl with eyes that the sasuke of three years ago did not think he could afford to buy)

Despite all these excellent points Naruto eventually, after a surprised second, answers: "Yes. It does."

"Not to upset your delusions," Sasuke says slowly, "but, just as an example, when I left I didn't even have enough _sakki_ for you to perceive it on a conscious level; when I let it out earlier today you could hardly walk through it."

"Could too! Er. Not the point. Um. I realize stuff happened and some things changed, but unlike you I recognize that some _didn't_. I mean, I mean, you're the person I knew after he gained certain things and lost certain things, but you're still the person I knew. Nothing can alter that."

"And you love me?" Sasuke pursues scathingly. "I whored myself out to a disgusting criminal for the power to kill my own brother, and you love me? I did what I did to the brats, and I still see no wrong with it, and you love me? I bloody well intended to kill you – and you love me?"

"For the record I could have lived very happily without you finding out about that," Naruto says, a modest blush over his face. "But yeah. I do. It doesn't mean I have to like everything you do or agree with all your crazy opinions. Honestly, god knows I hate Orochimaru's guts, and–"

"Orochimaru _is_ me, can't you see that? Not all of me, never that, but a good third of what constitutes me is him. There's no avoiding that, you blind _fool_."

"I don't care. Or, yeah, I do, but I – I love you." He also looks absolutely wretched saying it (sasuke wouldn't dream of blaming him). "That's more important, and I couldn't change it if I wanted. That's what matters."

He's not a fox, he's a fucking dog, loyal to death and hanging on with teeth and claws and stupid mindless stubborn dedication to whatever he's fixated on.

"I did say you were dumb," Sasuke says, abashed. However, something found underneath the underneath, below his surface self and below Orochimaru, somewhere down there inside the person he was before Itachi and everything – something propels him towards Naruto, places his hands light on the whisker scars and makes him not lash out. Naruto's mouth is grim and Sasuke's hands tremble on his face, dig into the soft flesh.

If nothing else it's an efficient way to end the discussion, before any (more) unforgivable words can be uttered. He does not believe in unselfish love, but he does believe Naruto believes in it. It's going to be an ugly, painful mess when he realizes there's no such thing, not in this world, and Sasuke's life is ugly and painful and messy enough as it is.

The rice is burnt beyond rescue, but he manages to salvage most of the meat and they did store up on manju. Dinner is nevertheless a quiet affair, and as a prudent measure in his Great Plan To Get Fat In Order To Keep Baby And Thus Provide Dead Ancestors With An Heir, and also in his Other Great Plan To Avoid Fighting With Naruto Because Otherwise One Of Us Will End Up Doing Something Really Really Stupid And Then I Might Lose The Baby After All, Sasuke elects to go to bed immediately following the meal.

"You do the wash-up," he orders.

"But–"

"Learn to cook for yourself if you don't want to clean."

And fairness does matter to Naruto, after all.

He's mostly asleep when Naruto enters the bedroom and slips in beside him, represses the instinctive jump into wakefulness – this is safe, this could never be a threat, I am going to sleep.

Unfortunately success at this point does not save him from waking up disoriented in the middle of the night.

Where am I? Sound? The nursery in the main house in the Uchiha Compound? The apartment with Uchiha Sasuke written on the door? The one whose name tag says Orochimaru?

Lost in the red darkness?

…I don't know.

Right now, I don't even care.

Who, then? Who is he?

Sasuke? Orochimaru?

Swallowing thickly to keep his panicked panting as inaudible as at all possible, cold sweat lying like a dead lover in bed with him, he feels around himself, cautious as is any ninja's reflex, fingers brushing against a warm body that moves softly in time with its breathing.

The most important question is suddenly: who is in bed with me?

Is it Sasuke, the proudly prideless little adult (because he's small but he's not innocent enough to be a child) the one he likes to fuck?

Orochimaru, the snake impersonating human, the one who likes to fuck him?

(that he likes to fuck him, and he almost wishes he could believe he'll burn in hell for that)

A heart the rhythm of which is impossibly familiar beats beneath his hand, thudding with the force of a god of all the wild things although situated in the frail, breakable body of a human boy, not entirely tame.

Sasuke leans over and kisses him.

There is nothing brief or bright about it: it is a kiss of experience and need, the kiss of a courtesan or a rapist, deep and wet and vicious.

Naruto does not wake to Sasuke playfully close, to the light pressure of lips on his mouth.

Naruto wakes to Sasuke pressed up acutely against him, his entire body focused on the presence and pressure of his mouth stretched wide over Naruto's, his tongue searching the crevices inside it.

Whoever he is, Sasuke or Orochimaru, and whoever this is in bed with him, Sasuke or Orochimaru or Naruto or someone else with no name he knows, this is the appropriate response; this is to cling to solidity in the only way he can be allowed (knows how).

Naruto wakes spluttering, barely able to breathe, grabs his arms from instinct.

"Sasuke," he says, voice ragged and worried (and yes, undeniably aroused).

Sasuke supposes that clears up the problem of what to call himself, though it does little to solve the deeper issue of his actual identity, if he has one (or several).

"Mmh," he mumbles, and remembers that Sasuke has never in his life fucked anyone: Orochimaru fucks, Itachi fucks, Kakashi fucks, Sasuke gets fucked, that's how it goes.

It is only much later, when Naruto's hand ghosts up the inside of his thigh, that he recalls he's currently a girl and would thus be hard pressed to fuck anybody.

"We shouldn't," Naruto protests, panting. "Look, about what you told me before, about…"

Sasuke really isn't in the mood to talk, is after something much simpler and much more complex than that, the deep impacts of shallow connections.

A couple of hard years in the real world have taught him how to get what he wants. Get what he can of what he wants, and forget the rest. Live with the lack of emotion and security.

Hold onto Naruto and roll over onto your back, drag Naruto with you, feeling the air pressed out of your lungs as the heavier body lands on yours. Kiss the protests from Naruto's lips.

xxxxxxxxxx


	12. My Lost Ones

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 12:**

" **My Lost Ones"**

Naruto wakes with shame a distinct vileness in the back of his throat, just touching his palate and threatening to either flood up through his mouth and force its way into the outside world or to fall back down into his stomach, to lie there a leaden unbearable heaviness.

He falls out of sleep due to Sasuke scrambling off the bed, a speed-blurry impression of translucent-pallid face lined with unpleasantness. Hurrying after him, grabbing for the warmth of a hand but shrinking back guiltily when denied the contact, Naruto remembers to snag a bathrobe and wraps it around himself.

Childishly unbothered about being seen in the nude, Sasuke is leaning over the toilet, being nonchalantly, noisily sick.

Naruto bites his lip. He can see the bruises on Sasuke's neck from here, the fading bites still bright on the pale skin, the new shadows of pressing fingertips painted out across the back of it.

Yeah, good going, Naruto. Screwing a person you've claimed to love, and whose confusion and pain are obvious enough even you have caught on, a person who only yesterday let slip he's been systematically sexually abused over the course of three long years.

"What?" Sasuke says, peering discontently at him while standing up and flushing the toilet, unhurriedly reaching for a discarded shirt to cover himself with. He does not look hateful, does not look a victim.

He looks like Sasuke, grumpy from being woken early by ungodly abdominal cramps, with a little bit of dried drool sticking to one edge of his mouth, swollen from Naruto's kisses, and the defect makes him adorably human in the middle of all that strained alabaster beauty. He looks like Sasuke, plain and simple, because Naruto has seen the thin girliness of his body often enough by now not to reflect over it anymore.

"Nothing," Naruto says, amends the statement to, "Too much."

Sasuke nods as though he understands, which he probably does because he's Sasuke and he's uncanny like that, understanding when you least expect him to and when it's most crucial.

"I think I can stomach some breakfast," Sasuke says conversationally, padding back into the bedroom to wrap a thick dressing gown over the thin shirt.

"Isn't there some kind of medicine or something you could take?" Naruto blurts, because if he could at least be helpful with that, with something, maybe he wouldn't have to feel so wretched.

_How can you make a mistake up to someone who won't even acknowledge that it happened?_

"I don't think so," Sasuke says, moderate and careful. "I'll have to ask Sakura."

"Let's hope to heaven she doesn't match up against Ino again, or she won't be talkable for a week."

"Right," Sasuke says. "The exam. Today. It'd slipped my mind."

"You're not worried?" Naruto asks needlessly, pushing the sad remnants of the kitchen table into a corner with his foot. He isn't exactly anxious himself either, though he could hardly claim Sasuke's stone-cold, stone-certain unaffectedness. Really, he's a bit excited about it all, the magic still clings to the words (chuunin, exam, passed, you made it, you did something well) even though he knows the reality beyond them to be fairly bleak.

"No." It's hard to be completely sure when the sound of the tea water boiling obscures his voice, but Sasuke sounds mostly condescending. "I'm not worried." He shrugs lightly, the absurdly thin arc of his shoulders underneath the heavy draping of the fabric again oddly reminiscent of a bird moving its wings. "I suppose I shall have to make inquiry to the judge or Kakashi or someone about how they want it set up."

"Huh?"

Sasuke gives a long-suffering sigh that Naruto grudgingly admits to be mostly justified when the explanation springs forth: "I could take the entire bunch of kids out within a few seconds. So, I dearly hope, could you. But since the event's largely about showing off, that'd probably not go over so well. I assume we'll have to playact for a bit, let the brats use what few techniques they know before we knock them out."

"Yeah, guess you're right. I hadn't thought about it that way."

Hadn't thought about it at all, because the Chuunin Exam is still something glorious and unattainable and unbelievable, and he might as well still have been a child wanting to fight Sasuke and everyone else for his recognition. The idea to pretend battle with Konohamaru seems preposterous, ludicrous.

They aren't in time, because Naruto forgets to account for the fact this building is situated considerably farther from the arena than his old apartment, and Sasuke is busy throwing up again.

Oh, well. At least they're both used to being late.

They've barely arrived before they have to clear off in an undignified rush, have only just hit the stands when Hanabi kicks Ino's ass halfway across the arena. She is very much like Neji, the perfect Hyuuga specimen, bred through and through into a quiet, snow-pale whirlwind of impenetrable destruction. Throughout the match, provided it can be called that, her eyes never change expression, save they go a smudge darker when she activates her Byakugan – a quirk, unnatural but unavoidable, which tagged along with the greatness, both due to the inbreeding. A single strand of hair falls across her face, and, standing calm and beautiful in the way that the victorious are, watching Ino's crumpled form a hundred paces away, the sunflower of golden hair that will not rise again, she smoothes it back.

Sasuke descends to the arena with casual elegance, afterwards, and Naruto hears the rising typhoon of sound among the spectators. _Isn't that…?_

They do not have time to ascertain anything, because the assigned opponent, a young man Naruto thinks might trace his origin to some far away land, takes one look at Sasuke and forfeits.

In his place, and this isn't fair, it's lunacy, they bring out Moegi, after Naruto has played around with Udon and strangers have won and lost.

Even far up among the stands Naruto can see the child trembling, but she bites her lip, and he thinks, proudly, she doesn't give up.

Even though he's old enough now to realize there's not a thing she can do, and it'd be easier for her to just accept it, and easy doesn't have to equal unacceptable.

Eventually he understands her lack of backing out might be largely due to the fact her teeth are clattering so badly she could not force the words of surrender out.

Everyone is growing impatient, Naruto awaiting catastrophe, but Moegi doesn't move, and you don't force a little girl to throw herself at death's mercy, and Sasuke isn't doing anything either, but you don't tell a barely sane murderer to attack a helpless child.

Sniffing, at last she starts forming seals. Sasuke mirrors them calmly, lets her get away with attack after attack, simply parries them with exact replications. Naruto remembers him talking about playing along with the showing off, and gets a headache trying to think of how much chakra control Sasuke must be exercising to keep himself on Moegi's level.

It ends without drama, after it's clear Moegi has tried what she can and Sasuke puts her to sleep.

Konohamaru beats a guy Naruto has never seen before and Hanabi picks him apart.

Sasuke is up again all too soon, faced this time with Chouji, and Naruto's relief is so enormous his knees grow week and feeble under its weight.

Until he remembers Chouji's usually smart because normally Shikamaru is there to tell him what to do, and he'll seriously try something, and Sasuke might get annoyed.

He shouldn't have to be worried. Not among all these people, with so much at stake, and yet, and yet…

Electric blue chakra shimmies over Sasuke's hand, and Sakura-chan's brute force alone hinders Naruto from throwing himself down there this instant, but (_thank heaven!_) Sasuke dismisses the forming Chidori and elects to crush the Meat Tank with pure simple taijutsu.

It's a ridiculous sight: a girl slim and short as a stick, throwing herself with what looks like recklessness but isn't at the great moving bulk.

It's even more ludicrous a sight to see Chouji courting dirt a few brutally elegant moves later.

Chouji, who's failed the Chuunin Exam five times running.

Sasuke, who's… well, who's just that good.

Immediately afterwards Naruto is up against Sakura-chan.

She looks at him speculatively, head tilted minimally to the side.

"I guess I'll try," she says at last.

Naruto can make too many shadow clones for her genjutsu to capture them all, though, and she simply is not a fighter. Not a real one; not a winner.

Sensible she's always been, and after a little trial and (spectacular) error, after a bit of everything going incredibly wrong for both of them because she isn't capable of attacking and he can't attack her, she tilts her head again, in just the same fashion though she's sitting down now, legs elegantly tucked in, dust on her dress.

"I give up," she says, and victory is very hollow. Relief is there to make up for some of it.

Two more matches, after which he is standing face to face with Sasuke down there, with the cheering crowd distant as childhood and childhood very present after all. He's tingling, all of him, there's a scratchy feeling like stars detonating through him, centered at the nape of his neck. Because of course it is the two of them in the end (the curse seal is burning on my stomach).

Waiting for the red to bleed into Sasuke's eyes, he finds Sasuke looking at him curiously, contemplatively.

Pallid lips open, and Naruto tenses in anticipation of the challenge certain to be spoken, perhaps worded as caution and all the more certain to give him an adrenaline OD for it.

What Sasuke says, however, and the words are incredible and impossible, is: "I forfeit."

"Pardon?" slips out the judge's not-closed mouth.

"I surrender my right to fight," Sasuke says very calmly. "I concede defeat. My opponent wins by walkover."

"What the hell are you doing?" Naruto demands, confused and something like hurt.

"I'm not going to hurt you."

"I'm not planning on _letting_ you hurt me!"

"Grow up!" Sasuke screams back, and apparently he has forgotten they are in public. Depressing, that the whole of Leaf should mean so little to him these days that they can fade from his consciousness as easily and completely as this. "You're you, you'll try and try and you have stupid luck and tricks that shouldn't work, and before or later you'll threaten the baby, and I'll have to be something approaching serious. I don't – I can't control the foreign chakra as well as I'd like. The damage probably would not be repairable. I won't have that. So I forfeit."

Naruto has just won the Chuunin Exam and rushes after Sasuke out of the arena.

The Uchiha walks sedately, steps measured, and it is the easiest thing in the world to catch up. Less easy is deciding what to do, since Naruto's instinct is to force the quarrel solved but Sasuke is sitting down, back against the outer wall of the arena and legs drawn up, arms resting on his knees.

He looks frailer suddenly than he did even beside Chouji's grotesque Larger Than Life technique, without the energy of motion and intent. Looks a civilian girl, distanced and perhaps a smudge sad. The new clothes, dark and non-descript, make an uninvolved onlooker's first thought: You should eat more, you don't look healthy at all.

"Hey, Loser Boy," he says, crouching in front of Sasuke, just a few significant centimeters of air separating them. "Aren't you looking morose?"

"I suppose," Sasuke says. "You're so stupid. You have to get better, fast, you absolutely have to – Orochimaru used to whisper about it, and I, I didn't care so much about it then, but I think there's another war coming. Why else would they be in such a hurry to churn out more Chuunin and Jounin?"

"A war?" Naruto repeats uncertainly. "You mean between the hidden villages? Isn't the Akatsuki the Big Bad?"

"They disbanded more than a year ago," Sasuke says. "Are you telling me you didn't know? Damn, the ANBU's worse than I thought if they haven't picked up on it."

"We should tell Tsunade."

"Yes. I except that would be prudent. But surely you see what this means – a heap of ridiculously powerful ninja of highly questionable morals, aggravated and bored? That means war."

"Why'd they even break up?"

"You want the truth? I fell asleep while Orochimaru was explaining it."

"Yeah," Naruto recalls. "He just went on and on and on… It must've been torture. Did he do dinner speeches?"

Sasuke winces. "Don't talk about that. Ever."

Naruto's grin fades slowly into solemnity. "But, about what you said earlier – about war…?"

"You do realize most of the Akatsuki share Orochimaru's opinion of war as entertainment?"

"I – I suppose."

"Exactly. Now let's go talk to Tsunade."

Forgetting the fact he's resting on his haunches, he offers Sasuke a hand up and almost falls backwards, saving himself only through wild flailing.

Sasuke snorts and, standing now, composed and elegant and so fucking annoying, offers _him_ a hand. Naruto takes it, because it's the snort that means You Really Are A Clumsy Idiot, But I Guess I Like You Anyway, not the one declaring You Are So Damn Hopeless, Stop Wasting My Time, Asshole.

Only a fool would confuse them.

It seems Sasuke's got some things confused however, because, as Naruto points out after a couple meters, this is not the way to the arena, where Tsunade is likely to be found.

"I noticed," Sasuke replies dryly. "We're looking for Kakashi."

Naruto might be many things, but this far delusional has not been one of them, and he's ready to swear they only just now agreed they were going to have word with the Hokage. Whom he is really pretty sure is Tsunade and not Kakashi-sensei.

"Well observed," Sasuke says. "She won't see us – two kids, still Genin, not when she's entertaining the foreign delegates. She will see a Jounin she trusts."

Makes sense, Naruto supposes, and that's why, ten minutes later, they're standing in a ratty apartment building, faced with a shoddy gray door.

Shit, Naruto thinks, this makes my old building seem upper-end and nice. Isn't the Jounin salary supposed to be fairly generous?

"Um," he says. "Wait. Shouldn't he be at the arena too?"

"Probably," Sasuke says, inflectionless like he gets when he's not entirely comfortable with the situation at hand. "But he wasn't."

"How do you know? There were tons of people there, maybe you just missed him."

"No. If he'd been there he'd have been looking at me. I'd have noticed. He wasn't. Shut up."

Well, yeah, Kakashi-sensei would be a fool not to keep a careful eye on Sasuke, what with old responsibility and how he might need to step in. And yeah, being what he is now, there is no way Sasuke wouldn't have been aware he was being watched.

"Kakashi," Sasuke calls through the door, giving the scratchy surface a bit of a pounding. No reply. "We're coming in."

Naruto notes, absent and with a feeling of growing discomfort, that Sasuke handles the broken lock and navigates through the shitty apartment with the practiced distaste of one who is not a first-time visitor. He doesn't even look at the dirty shelves or the old furniture, just steps past the junk and forward.

This is not the first time Naruto has seen Kakashi-sensei out of the Jounin uniform, or indeed unconscious, but he has never minded it so much before.

Kakashi-sensei is lying on his side on the broken-in bed, white hair falling softer than ever before, licking at his sleep-scrunched face. He's not actually wearing anything on his upper body, even the mask is gone, and in its absence Naruto sees black oily spots climbing up Kakashi-sensei's long neck, multiplying on the underside of his chin and distorting one edge of his mouth.

He cannot imagine anyone unfamiliar with the marks would be able to avoid staring (i also cannot believe i didn't try to do anything to help when my role-model is obviously so far sunk into drink and depression as to not notice our entrance).

Sasuke does not spare the scars a glance, however, so he might be wrong, but then there is that matter of Sasuke being much too at home here, and, worse, much too unbothered about their teacher's state of undress.

"Kakashi," he says, invading the bedroom with queer familiarity while Naruto stands uncomfortably just inside the doorway, watching Sasuke's dainty calloused hand touch the sleeping man's face – light, hesitant, burning through the skin the way Sasuke always does.

"Sasuke," says Kakashi-sensei, quite clearly but still with his eyes closed and all appearances of sleeping, which leads Naruto to the wild momentary conclusion he is talking in his sleep, but then the gray eye is open and alert. "I meant it. I …wasn't planning to, but I did. Still do. You should be aware of that. I meant it."

"I know," Sasuke says, with the kind of weary genuineness that can't be faked.

"But you don't believe it's possible for me to mean it," Kakashi-sensei argues softly, like a man talking about something that does not concern him. "You don't believe in the existence of the – let us call it mood – of the mood I claim with regard to you."

He's sitting up, after he's said it, sitting up at once, as though he did not need to actually go through the motions _of_ sitting up to read the position, sitting naked in his bed with Sasuke's hand on his face and both eyes on Sasuke's throat.

"Perhaps I have reconsidered," Sasuke says, letting his hand fall. "I believe you."

Slowly, for being Kakashi-sensei, clearly testing whether Sasuke will allow this, fingers no longer as steady as they were before all the alcohol, Kakashi-sensei reaches out and Sasuke lets him lay a filthy, comfortable hand on the stomach with the child inside it.

"I know," Kakashi-sensei says. "I mean what I said, all the same. You should know that, in case it ever becomes relevant."

"I do. I always did."

Sasuke does not move the hand from his abdomen, his fingers playing lightly across Kakashi-sensei's face. He is disturbingly comfortable with standing inches from a naked man in said man's bedroom, with the man's hand on his body. Kakashi-sensei's free thumb brushes, equally light, over the line of Sasuke's jaw, fingers curving around the juncture of neck and shoulder. It is as though he leaves a mark there as definite as the lovebite scars.

The mutual understanding and indefinable deep emotion vibrating between them is enough to make Naruto sick with loneliness, rejection a sharp not-forgotten shock hitting him like a wave, crushing, washing him off his feet.

The weak sound that comes, a wounded animal's whine, must have been his after all, because Kakashi-sensei says, "Naruto."

It is not clear, from his tone, whether he was aware from the beginning of Naruto's presence or only now discovered it.

His hand falls slowly from Sasuke's face, and Sasuke too recovers his wayward limbs. Kakashi-sensei's other hand remains on his stomach, however. Neither of them seems to mind, though it is obvious they must be acutely aware of it.

"Tsunade," Naruto reminds. "Talk to. About the Akatsuki."

"The Akatsuki?" Kakashi-sensei inquires with a bit of his old sharpness, his forgotten clarity. The echo of obvious authority lining the question would've been more than enough to make Naruto start explaining, but Sasuke speaks before he can (he never did wait to be called on, of course, not uchiha sasuke whose answers were always the right ones, and god, how naruto envied and resented him for that).

"I understood you had not heard the latest concerning the organization," Sasuke says, in the deep smooth voice that should only be used to address Naruto. "Informing the Hokage presented itself as a worthwhile course of action."

"The latest?"

"That'd be the internal power struggles and fighting that lead to the disbanding thirteen months ago, I assume. Everything else I have is sketchy – it wasn't my priority at the time, and I've only encountered a handful of them."

"We're seeing Tsunade now," Kakashi-sensei declares decisively. A few moments of silence and intense visual searching of the room later he asks rather more plaintively, though strangely, typically unembarrassed, "Anyone see my clothes?"

"Jesus," Sasuke mutters in disgust, pulling his overlarge shirt over his head, revealing a thinner one underneath. "Take it and hurry up."

The sleeves are too short on Kakashi-sensei, and when he moves the entire thing slides up to reveal slices of skin, but since it turns out he's (thankfully) wearing some kind of pajama pants Naruto supposes you could consider him decent, if you're open-minded and not snobby.

The Chuunin guards give off a perfectly understandable impression of uncertainty regarding whether to allow a hardly-dressed Jounin everyone knows has been snapping and drinking and two kids into the assembly hall.

"I," one of them starts, clearly uncomfortable. "I'll slip in and alert her to your presence, and I'm sure she'll agree to see you after the banquet."

"That'd be marvelous," Kakashi-sensei smiles, "if what I said was that I wanted to see her afterwards." He tilts his head rather like Sakura-chan did earlier, though with a swift cruelty she does not possess. "I'd no idea they let you pass the Chuunin Exam with defective hearing."

Forcibly, it strikes Naruto for the first time on a conscious level how utterly alike they are, Sasuke and Kakashi-sensei, cold and detached and scorning the world before it can scorn them. Hurt enough to almost hate humanity, yet unable to break up with it.

(sasuke will make for the lousiest parent _ever_)

"Look," the guard tries uncomfortably to reassert his authority. "I know who you were, the fancy Copy Ninja, but things are different now."

"They are," Kakashi-sensei agrees amiably.

Naruto catches, he thinks, most of the implications hanging on to the simple phrase: _Yes, things have changed, I have declined, and the funny part is that after all the drinking and the rumors of madness and after I stopped eating and started openly reading porn on missions I'm still better than you'll ever be. It doesn't matter what I do or you, I'll still matter and you still won't. Yes, things have changed from when I became the Copy Ninja – what was I, thirteen? I made Jounin before you'd become a Genin, there were legends about me while you still slaved through failing exams that could never slow me down. _

Or maybe that's just Naruto putting words in Kakashi-sensei's mouth, for all the man does is shrug a little.

"I need to see the Hokage," he clarifies, clam and indulgent. "That means I'm going in. Whether you try to stop me or not, let's get it over with at once, alright?"

The guard looks uncertain, until Sasuke puts a hand on Kakashi-sensei's arm in a distinctly over-familiar gesture and leans forward.

"I've been trying to play nice, since I got back," he says conversationally. "But I'm getting fucking tired of all this. I never was a good liar, and I never was a reluctant killer."

Naruto scrambles into the banquet hall in their wake after Sasuke brushes aside the guard, who's not fighting back, and sweeps forward alongside Kakashi-sensei.

Shockingly, it turns out he's the only one whose presence isn't questioned – he's the Chuunin Exam Champion, after all. (i'd forgotten?)

Sasuke, for once in their lives, looks scruffy and out of place in his too-big black clothes and with the panda-like circles under his eyes, attached to Kakashi-sensei's even trashier side.

Far down in the sea of peacocking strangers who've never looked death in the face is Tsunade, but not among them; her distinct pale-golden head above the green clothing spotted in a corner. She's talking to someone obscured by her broad back, completely inaccessible to all the foreigners.

Customarily Shizune is the one who has to pick up her slack, thin dark figure rushing in a controlled frenzy among the delegates. Kurenai too smiles flirtily at the right people, Morino Ibiku walks around looking solemn even with a glass of champagne in his war-marked hand (gai and anko, as always, are kept carefully out of anyone's sight).

"Tsunade," Kakashi-sensei says, Sasuke half-hidden behind him and Naruto surging forward through an insulted crowd to join them. She doesn't turn until he touches her elbow – her eyes, when she does, registers anxiety. "You'll want to hear this at once."

"Pervert Hermit!" Naruto exclaims, because revealed by her turning around is Jiraiya, a little more tanned than when he left on his mystery quest, a little thinner, though Naruto harbors no illusions that the latter will last now Jiraiya has returned to a village equipped with a restaurant district. He has heard the man reentered Leaf a few days ago, of course, but forgot about looking for him, what with all the excitement and fear brought back into his life along with Sasuke.

"Naruto," Jiraiya acknowledges, bestowing a gruff nod on him before turning back to more important matters. "Kakashi, if you don't mind, I was just briefing Tsunade on what I've found out about the Akatsuki."

"Let's all hear if I need to interrupt, then," Kakashi-sensei says indolently. "By all means continue."

Naruto always had the impression his teachers rather liked each other, that there was mutual respect between them, with Jiraiya as the senior – clearly that has changed, or he was wrong all along. There is no humility in Kakashi-sensei (there was when he looked at sasuke, reverent and dirty). With his eyes fixed on the Sannin who squandered his life on booze and loose women too, though his were realer than those Kakashi-sensei found in his books, it is utterly gone.

Only now does he realize what has Tsunade and Jiraiya startling and staring a little, that Kakashi-sensei has not bothered with the mask or the headband. His Sharingan eye is inactivated, a dull red half-closed thing because it is not of him, and unlike Sasuke he can never quite be its master, only someone the Bloodline Limit grudgingly concedes to serve in the absence of a true Uchiha (the ugly scars glitter in the lamplight, morbidly clear against the backdrop of skin that makes sasuke's seem swarthy in comparison).

"What've you found out?" Naruto prompts at last, subjugating the tension.

"A little of this and a little of that," Jiraiya says at last, reluctant and grumpy, a child caught with his hand too close to the cookie jar. "It's hard to get first-hand information."

"Not anymore," Kakashi-sensei interjects, closing a hand around Sasuke's shoulder and steering him forward to stand close in front of him, in the middle of their gathering. "It's right here."

"The filthy little traitor?" Jiraiya says, equal parts disgusted and disbelieving.

"Jiraiya!" Tsunade snaps. "He's not Orochimaru."

"No," her old comrade immediately agrees. "Instead of Orochimaru we go to his disciple, now? We're consulting _Orochimaru's whore_ on a serious matter?"

Sasuke is the only one who displays no surprise at the words, not the slightest hint of aggravation or insult or protective outrage.

"Not even denying it, huh?" Jiraiya goes on to gloat, and Naruto thinks, panicked: _is this what I would have become, if the most important person in the world had not been returned to me?_

"Why should I?" Sasuke says, speaking the way he was raised to, a cold condescending lord addressing an erring subject. "Your opinions are as entirely irrelevant as yourself."

Jiraiya's face goes gray, and Naruto realizes those are not Sasuke's words, not originally.

"Outside. Now. And I'll show you how to straighten out little punks."

Sasuke chances a speculative glance at Tsunade. "Would I be held responsible for the resultant damage?"

She closes her eyes as if in pain, and Naruto experiences a sudden vivid flash of how she must have looked thirty years ago, when her face wasn't a lie, when her carriage was slender and proud without the cloak of a genjutsu. When Orochimaru had left, and she realized in the wake of this for perhaps the first time that she loved him. Wildly, unquestioningly, unstoppably had she loved him. Not like her brother, not like her boyfriend, relationships that she could control. Orochimaru had been something else, like Jiraiya still is (something she has spent the rest of her life fleeing from).

"Tomorrow," she decides at last. "You can fight tomorrow. In the arena. After I've heard the first-hand report."

(perhaps it was a hasty mistake, after all, to kill kabuto, who might have known things, but she has forgotten how to regret; lives a lament)

She and Sasuke sweep away for a private conference on the subject of the Akatsuki and Sasuke's knowledge thereof, leaving Naruto overhearing his younger teacher saying to his elder:

"I'm sorry, but he's the one. It has to be him."

xxxxxxxxxx


	13. Unable Me

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 13:**

"**Unable Me"**

"Sasuke," Naruto says in the darkness; the meeting with Tsunade dragged on well into the night.

"What?"

The dim shape of slightly more solid darkness that must be Sasuke moves around the room, presumably stripping for bed, and Naruto means to answer, only the last few hours of having the bed all to himself sit choking in his throat. Funny it's a bed, by the way: he'd have expected a futon, what with the good old Uchiha traditions and all.

"Naruto?" Sasuke stops, sounding faintly irritated, standing right beside the bed, leaning forward to touch him. Scratchy warm skin presses against Naruto's cheek, and he doesn't have to reach out. "What?"

"Nothing," he says. "It's fine now. Get in here so I can lie down, would you?"

There's no point getting comfortable before Sasuke has, because Sasuke will invariably worm his way around you until he has his back against the wall and can attack everything in the room unobstructed, and probably he will wake you up in the process with cold feet and sharp elbows.

Snorting, which Naruto guesses was inevitable, Sasuke obediently slips under the coverlet beside him, the weirdly silky fabric of his shirt tickling Naruto's arm.

"What is this thing anyway?" he mumbles, tugging at it, quite incidentally tugging Sasuke closer in the process, burying the other's body against his own.

Since Sasuke doesn't resist he finds himself lying with a wiry barely-dressed girl on his chest and swallows, realizing where his thoughts are heading and where they ended up last night. He has no wish to visit that rough guilt again, has to distract himself. It's just hard to think of anything more compelling than Sasuke's chest pressed flat against his, Sasuke's hips aligning with his.

(--_if not my body, and gods know i loaned that to him often enough..._)

"It's a shirt," Sasuke says slowly, voice going a shade husky and more than a little condescending.

_Your mother's, isn't it, Sasuke-kun? Or should that be our mother's, now?_

Fuck off.

_Always so elaborate, Sasuke-kun. Glorying in the oedipal overtones, yes? You're more twisted than you like to pretend. But I know. I always knew._

I did not kill my father (i should've been strong enough). I've extracted vengeance. I certainly am not sleeping with my mother.

_Tsk, tsk, child._

Naruto feels Sasuke's sigh at the base of his throat, tries to inch into a position that doesn't cause immediate contact between his pelvis and anything Sasuke, fails spectacularly and ends up with one of Sasuke's legs between his and one of Sasuke's eyebrows climbing towards his hairline.

_Most every little one has an inter-family first love; don't pretend you're an exception. Your brother was always the exceptional one, not you. Ah, your brother…_

Naruto startles as Sasuke starts shaking, hyperventilating, clawing at Naruto's shoulders, his eyes red and blank.

"Sasuke! Hey, Sasuke! C'mon, 's okay, I'm here, alright? Sasuke?"

_You loved him. That is why you hated him. And you hated me… doesn't that make for some interesting implications, my Sasuke-kun?_

Naruto scrambles into a sitting position. Sasuke is lost to the world, his head on Naruto's shoulder, his body halfway in Naruto's lap. And I am terrified and tender and a little sickened that it also pleases me; Sasuke, Uchiha Sasuke, is breaking down, here and now, and I alone can see.

Sick with fright, as well, and how do I help?

_There is just you now – you let him take everything away, your family, me, himself. And I know, you could never hide it; that after him other people just didn't seem to matter. They weren't real to you. Even you are hardly real to you, isn't that so? You will fall into the red darkness, and you will be mine. I'm waiting for you there, with all your lost ones._

Fuck you!

He comes back to himself in a rush, finds his body rocking against Naruto, the blond wrapped around him and mumbling upset retarded shit.

"Let go," he says. Doesn't mean it.

"You alright? What happened?"

"Don't." Means that.

"Okay," Naruto lies, weighing the choices and deciding on the compromise: it's talk or hold on, and words aren't his forte.

But the quiet is very strained.

"It's fine," Sasuke snaps.

"Huh," says Naruto, casting around for a semi-relevant change of topic. I just keep screwing up, and I can't do that anymore. "So, um, I asked Kakashi-sensei why he'd left the mask, and he said, about the scars, that they're proof of what love does to you, and like, he felt he might need the reminder again. Why's – that does make any sense to you?"

"Yeah," Sasuke mumbles absently, lying very white against the pillow. Naruto's instinct was to fight to keep him in his arms, but he didn't. Couldn't. "When his mother killed herself, about a year after his father's suicide, she tried to take him with her. It's what the marks originate from."

"How the hell did you know that?" Being startled Sasuke knows is easier, by far, than coming to grips with _what_ he knows.

(is it just me or does every spectacular ninja build his life on the fundament of a royally screwed up childhood?)

(kakashi-sensei, orochimaru, sasuke, gaara, neji, zabuza, haku, kimimarou, naruto himself)

_His father killed himself. His mother killed herself. His mother tried to kill him._

_Obito died, the Fourth died; his friend died, his teacher died._

Compared to his role models, Kakashi-sensei's reading porn and being perpetually late and a terrible liar mightn't be so strange or so bad.

"He told me a lot of things," Sasuke says in an annoyed, off-hand voice, "that it might've been easier if I didn't know."

Things I shouldn't have asked for.

"Yeah," Naruto recalls. "Like that whatever it was he insisted he'd really meant."

"The whatever?" Sasuke sounds honestly incredulous. "Did you seriously not understand what he'd said?"

"No," Naruto says sullenly. "How the hell would you expect me to get it? You weren't exactly repeating it word for word, either one of you."

Sasuke broke down five minutes ago and we're bickering. Way to go, crazy people.

"Just as well, probably," Sasuke dismisses, and Naruto is reminded of something else Sasuke did not want him to know.

"He did say," Naruto realizes while putting words on the thought, "that he knows who the kid's father is."

"Yes. Yes, he did. Yes, he does."

"So, like, what? I can't hear anything about it, but you told him?"

"He already knew," Sasuke clarifies. "He's hardly the only one to've drawn the correct conclusions, either."

"Tell me."

It is probably several minutes before Sasuke says: "I can't."

"Why not?"

"Because that'd make it real!"

"It is real!" Naruto argues back. "It's there, it's alive, it's growing inside you this second, and the father isn't going to change. You'd better come to terms with it before the baby's born!"

"You have no idea what I need to do," Sasuke says, in the cold voice that means they've crossed the line into seriousness and danger. "What I have needed to do."

"I would if you'd bloody well tell me!"

"But that's just it," and the words slide out of his mouth like a snake slithering through gore. "I don't want to."

"Fine," Naruto says, a hurried brittle word, because anything he says will provoke replies that cut too deeply to heal, and he is aware, after all, that now is not the time.

(sasuke was _shaking_)

"It's not like you told me about the Kyuubi," Sasuke reminds him coldly, huffily.

"That wasn't the same! I thought you'd hate me."

"You're so fucking stupid, Naruto," Sasuke says. "Leave me the hell alone."

"Fine," Naruto bites out again. "Whatever, bastard. Like I care."

This time he's the one curling up on his side at the edge of the bed, because Sasuke's on his back in the middle of it and looking far too immersed in some strange contemplation to move, and Naruto can't touch him right now.

If he forces answers, forces explanations and connections and nearness (why did you leave us, why did you come back, whose is the child?) – it will end in violence, it always does, and quite probably in sex, and that's, that wouldn't be alright.

Next morning too he wakes to the noise of Sasuke retching in the adjoining bathroom. He is not at liberty to approach today, however. Couldn't stand it, when Sasuke won't want him and besides he doesn't want to have to live with himself after fighting with a sick pregnant person.

Instead he pulls on his clothes very hastily and ambles into the kitchen, carefully not looking towards the bathroom because then there would be nothing in heaven or in hell stopping him from rushing to Sasuke's side after all. I know myself that well, at least. Sasuke's his bastard, and he's not supposed to be hurting, not like this.

In the kitchen he decides he's tired of doing the dishes; it's about time he started cooking for himself. How hard can it be?

The assortment of prospective ingredients utterly defeats him, however – why don't these things come with instructions? The ramen packages always do.

Five minutes after the start of his fatal quest to make breakfast Sasuke sweeps in, thin and sickly in the baggy shirt. His hair hangs in matted flakes, obscuring a considerable part of his ashen face.

"Sasuke," he starts, thought with restraint, because he will not come running. "Hey, you need to sit down?"

"I'm fine," Sasuke cuts him off. "Get away from the stove, you'll burn the house down."

"Would not!" Naruto declares, agitated and flushed because it is too much like the secret Sasuke can't know.

"Look," Sasuke says, sharply, tiredly. "Can we argue after I beat the crap out of Jiraiya and get it out of my system?"

"That's crazy," Naruto is abruptly reminded. "Sure, he's old and fixated on girls and he drinks too much, but he's a _Sannin_!"

"So was Orochimaru," Sasuke replies calmly. "I defeated him, and his power is mine now. Itachi and Kisame were even better." He casts a furtive look around the kitchen. "Shit, I can't keep anything down."

"Then you have to consult a medic," Naruto says, worry bleeding through his voice in a most unintentional way. "You're too thin for anyone, particularly for someone carrying a child."

"Don't you think I know that?" Sasuke snaps tiredly. "I'll talk to Sakura after the deal with Jiraiya."

"About Jiraiya," Naruto begins uncertainly, because things are as they are: he loves Sasuke, and he'll have to deal with the consequences as best he can. "What he said to you was awful and untrue, but you shouldn't fight him. You're ill and expecting. Don't."

"It was awfully true," Sasuke contradicts, shrugs and starts brewing coffee. "I don't care about him, though, or about what he says. I'm still going to beat him up."

He empties most of his coffee mug in one gulp, and Naruto watches the strain in his face and throat as he fights down the immediate urge to throw it back up.

"Sasuke," he says, and is terrified to find Sasuke is sick and tired enough not to fight him as he draws in him close, resting his face in black hair that needs to be washed. "Don't do stupid things. Or if you have to do them, at least be sure you come back safely afterwards."

"I can't tell you about the father," Sasuke says, all falsity and affection washed clean out of his voice by weariness. "Because your opinions do matter. Can you accept that?"

Naruto nods, because he has to, and Sasuke's mouth tastes horrible from coffee and old vomit. He lingers over it, all the same.

Sasuke lets him hold his hand as they walk to the arena, and Naruto has learned to understand that Sasuke allowing equals Sasuke encouraging, most of the time.

It appears all of Leaf has heard about the match and everything else must have stopped completely (work places shutting down, schools and restaurants and possibly even part of the hospital) for this mass of spectators to gather.

Jiraiya is standing around indolently, absurd sandals steadily planted in the arena's sand. He is, Naruto hears the whispers spread like wind among the crowd, the strongest ninja in the village. The Hokage is always the best of the best, and they asked Tsunade-sama because Jiraiya-sama declined. Refused, more like it, and rudely too (he doesn't want naruto's childhood dream).

(didn't have naruto's nightmares)

Naruto stares at Sasuke's miniscule black form and is probably the only one directing his sympathies to the Uchiha side.

Tsunade declares they may start, and it happens that must happen.

Jiraiya is old, now. He has experience and a godawful amount of chakra, but time wears you down, all the lost chances that've swept by, that you've grasped for and missed.

With Orochimaru in his mind Sasuke has the same experience, knows far more of Jiraiya than Jiraiya knows of him, knows countless techniques; with Orochimaru's chakra added to his own, he has even more than Jiraiya. The stubbornness of youth is with him still.

Jiraiya uses taijutsu and ninjutsu, is the Frog Master.

Sasuke uses taijutsu and ninjutsu and genjutsu, is the Snake Master. His red eyes are such that once they catch you looking it is over, such that they can read an opponent's upcoming moves from the slightest twitch of his face, the merest hint of begun movement, now that he is serious. His hands form seals too quickly for anyone to decipher them.

It ends as it must end.

But not simply, because Jiraiya is a Sannin, he is the hero of a legend so old he can't corrupt it no matter how hard he tries.

_Sakki_ leaks from both of them, hardly anyone among the lower stands can be able to move, and Sasuke's original chakra isn't enough.

He's admitted his control over the chakra that used to be Orochimaru's is not excellent, he doesn't like to use it, but you do what you must, and his eyes go reptilian, a beautiful icy shade of insanity.

Naruto feels sick that he'd forgotten Sasuke must be able to do this, when the final strike comes: he's heard rumors about Orochimaru summoning the dead three years ago, setting Hokage against Hokage.

Of course Sasuke can call the deceased back to life under his command.

Orochimaru stands smiling in the arena.

Jiraiya falters.

"Oh shit," someone whispers behind him, and he glances over his shoulder at Shikamaru's frozen face. "Holy fucking shit."

The strongest ninja of the village, only not anymore because Uchiha fucking Sasuke has defeated him utterly.

Uchiha fucking Sasuke who, immediately afterwards, leans over, hands on his knees, and retches up the coffee he had for breakfast.

Naruto is filled with illogical tenderness: Sasuke has bitched at him all morning and beaten up Jiraiya and here he stands vomiting. We're stupid like that.

His gaze catches coincidentally on the Hyuuga assembly, an unmoving line of blank eyes. A mild blush crests Hanabi's cheeks, Neji looks like he's grinded his teeth down to the roots, Hinata a scared presence behind him. They aren't looking at each other, but Neji allows her to touch his hand.

Jumping between the stands Naruto hurries downward, towards Sasuke and Jiraiya, who's sitting up now with Tsunade's support.

Halfway down Iruka-sensei abruptly appears, standing sudden and solid in front of him. Scared kids, presumably his older students, crowd around him. "Naruto," he says, sounding wretched. "Be careful. _Think_. That isn't – he isn't safe."

"_It's Sasuke_," says Naruto.

When he reaches the arena floor Kakashi-sensei and Sakura-chan are both fluttering around Sasuke, and Naruto remembers Kakashi-sensei sealing the curse seal, Sakura-chan supporting Sasuke through the Forest of Death in the wake of its interference. Naruto had been surprised, then, that Sasuke allowed her to help him, thinks now with what feels like insight it might have been alright because she wasn't all that important.

"I'm fine," Sasuke insists, gaze locking on Naruto. "I want to go home."

"You're far from fine," Sakura-chan contradicts, firm like she only manages when she knows someone she loves will be hurt if she does not speak. "You're twenty pounds underweight, you obviously haven't slept properly for weeks, and now you've exhausted much of your chakra to boot. If you want the child to survive you have to adjust, have to get healthy. If you don't want it, there are easier ways to abort it that'll hurt you less."

She shudders backward from Sasuke's look at her, not black now nor red but the golden slits of someone else; presumably as filled as Naruto by the knowledge that if she were anyone else in the world Sasuke would have – she would not have been standing up again for a long time, if ever. Naruto fancies he can see the intent to lash out pulsating through Sasuke.

He's not going to do anything to Sakura-chan, of course. She can't defend herself, he knows that, so Naruto isn't worried, doesn't step in.

Perhaps because of that the elbow Sasuke grabs on to, fingers white with the desperation of the clutch, is Kakashi-sensei's.

"Stop me," he says.

"I've got it," Kakashi-sensei reassures briskly. "Sakura, go away."

"But…!"

"Run. Now. I'll have him stop by the hospital later."

She nods, teary-eyed, clears out, and Sasuke sags against their old teacher.

"You could seal me again," he says, words stumbling slurred out of his mouth, hissed through the red distance of desperation. "One of the gradually fading seals, so I could get used to it a little at a time. You could do that."

"We'd have to use one of the ones that reach deep for any real effect," Kakashi-sensei says, non-comittal.

"I was thinking of the Suzamo-wo no Jutsu," Sasuke rasps, and Kakashi-sensei and Tsunade both startle.

He twists halfway around in Kakashi-sensei's steadying hold, the one arm around his waist and the other locked around his shoulders, smiling sardonically into the unmasked face. "I trust you," he says, as though it is something he persists in doing despite knowing it is unwise. He sounds very sure, very plaintive, almost…loving, and isn't that the strangest word to put in connection with Uchiha Sasuke.

Kakashi-sensei says something Naruto can't hear, and Sasuke nods, a fast, hurt movement.

He says, "You only need to be shown once, right?"

"I don't need to be shown at all," Tsunade interjects, turning from Jiraiya now the medics are carrying him away. "I'll demonstrate it to Kakashi, that way you don't release anymore chakra and will be a lot less likely to lose control."

"Ah," Sasuke sighs.

"We'll meet up tonight, then," Tsunade decides. "My office. And after that when you're stable I am sending you in for a thorough health check."

Sasuke's eyes roll upward and he slumps fully. When Naruto is close enough to touch him, not sure how he got there through the immediate blur of panic, Kakashi-sensei has hefted him. Sasuke looks terrifyingly small, head lolling against the elder man's shoulder.

"He's a mess," Tsunade says. "The imposing of Orochimaru's mind and chakra put an enormous strain on him – add to that all the circumstantial shocks, particularly the pregnancy and the activation of the Mangekyou, and it's no wonder."

"I'll take him," Naruto says, reaching to receive the burden from Kakashi-sensei's arms. "He can rest at home."

"Excellent," Tsunade says. "Kakashi, we'd better go over it at once after I've checked Jiraiya."

Slime-like scars stretch with the movement of their owner's breathing, scarred sunburned fingers smooth hair out of Sasuke's face. The touch is brief, inorganic, but there is nothing uncertain about its wistfulness.

Absurdly, and the discovery chases anxiety through Naruto like a bolt of lightning, burning painful along his nervous system, absurdly Sasuke is even lighter in his arms than he was three days ago.

He does not wake up until evening. When the first stars are coming out he raises one arm, a ghostly movement of light and shadow in the darkened room, and pushes ink-colored hair out of his face. If he were a normal person he'd have yawned and scratched at his eyes, but because he is Sasuke he merely blinks a little, owlish and sleep-ugly and wonderful. He could be an incarnation of faded vividness: the hasty tilt to all his movements, the piercing angles of his smile.

"Naruto," he says, looking around for the glaring blondness that'll hurt his eyes. There, on the chair, rubbing a nap from his eyes.

"Sasuke," he replies, caution and relief tumbling around the words. "Better?"

"No," Sasuke must say, because the innocent inquiry brings the sneaking headache into pounding focus. He buries his face in his hands, palms pressing hard against eyes that see naught but reddish shades of blackness. "I'm overloading," he realizes, recording events with the detached delirious voice of a lab rat. "My body's not equipped for this much chakra, and I got it so suddenly it had no chance to adjust. It's – paired with the strain of the Mangekyou, it's too much for it."

Jesus Christ, holy fucking shit, and if only he could regret it.

That intolerable fluttery burn on skin convinced by a fracturing mind it is too frail to be touched without vanishing into splintered reality, fragments, might be Naruto gathering him up, trying to console, perhaps moving him, but he is not certain, cannot be sure.

A numbing blow lays him out across the bed, momentarily stops Orochimaru's attempt to pierce through all the layers of his mind, out through his very skull to impose his will on the surrounding reality.

"Sasuke!" He has never dreamed his name, a construction of syllables tied together under the dominion of human language, could sound so much like an animal's growl, carried on emotions too base and desperate to be identified as properly human. "Snap out of it!"

"Trying," Sasuke says, or mumbles, or shouts, forcing the word through dizzy recollections he can't be sure are his. "Should never have engaged his chakra during the match. I'd kept it restrained until now. I–"

When Sasuke talks, Naruto knows, it is bad.

(i am my old self again, or almost, my knees bending as though in helplessness and worship, as though my body is suddenly too heavy, too out of control, for them too support it, orochimaru's sex boring into me like a hardened white worm)

Upset voices rise and fall in the distance, and then everything is forced to dim down, to become insubstantial next to Kakashi's hand splayed out over his forehead, the single point of absolutely focused reality (power to shape what threatens to erase itself into a new tabula rasa, black and red and spinning).

He reminds himself that he has chosen this helplessness as his body gradually loses all obedience to his will and he falls backwards; hadn't noticed he'd sat up, but underneath Kakashi's gentle push he sprawls now on his back, limbs spread as though severed from the core of his body, this too severed from the core of his self.

(a ninja's body is a tool)

(_what is a ninja's mind?_)

Maybe that's what Naruto is yelling about (wouldn't surprise him, and through the thick sensory fog the words push his fading understanding in that direction): that he is fully and essentially at Kakashi's mercy.

But the Suzamo-wo no Jutsu is the only option. Sasuke is too stubborn for any of the lesser techniques to work, Orochimaru is too strong, and the classical ones, those used for sealing Tailed Demons into children, are only applicable when you strive to contain something from the outside, something separate.

And if it has to be the Suzamo-wo, has to be a jutsu that lays his mind open and vulnerable, liable to changes at the whim of the technique's executor, then it must be Kakashi performing it.

Not because Sasuke trusts him (for i have not yet reached the state of clinical retardation necessary to trust anyone) but because frankly it is Kakashi or Tsunade, and while they'd both no doubt love the opportunity to calibrate him to their liking, Kakashi is by far the less dangerous. It is not improbable he'll come fully to again with the irresistible urge to screw Kakashi silly, but he'll still be himself because Kakashi could never conceive of wanting anything so desperately as he wants that, and Sasuke has been through enough to scoff and shrug at a bit of costume play or cheesiness or whatever other sick shit is in those Icha Icha volumes. To know that humiliation doesn't kill you. Might leave you a bit sore, but it doesn't kill you.

Clearly it is incomparably preferable to becoming Tsunade's well-trained murder puppet, with nothing left of himself, not enough even to mourn the loss.

_She'd love that, baby boy. Bitch boy._

It is, nevertheless, with a vague sense of relief that he registers at length after Kakashi's touch has left his face and Kakashi's will his mind that he cannot summon any desire whatsoever to make an indecent fool of himself in a bunny girl suit.

He might snort at that, if he had the energy, which is familiar.

More unexpected, and at the same time less so, is the fact that the thought of parading around the village in a bunny girl suit in accordance with an older man's perverted pleasure still strikes him as a mildly demeaning waste of time, nothing worse.

From a Leaf perspective he should probably be alarmed that he's evidently the same person he was when the procedure commenced, this same particular hybrid of Uchiha Sasuke and Orochimaru, but he – not likes himself, but definitely he is himself enough not to mind. To be faintly relived, actually: he cannot imagine being that proud, unbent, unspoilt child anymore.

With a movement suddenly easy, answering perfectly to his will, he again sweeps overlong hair out of his face and sits up, with the same fluid thoughtless grace that has been burned into him. He ends up smirking a little, a frail sardonic expression, face to face with Kakashi (alright, face to throat) leaning back on his hands with a leg poking childishly over the edge of the bed on either side of his old teacher's looming form.

"Hey," he says, simple and implying, so many words lost between us. "It worked. I'm – glad."

Kakashi does not move as Sasuke fits a hand around his neck but stays entirely passive, neither helping nor hindering in the least as Sasuke proceeds to press their lips together, but his heart speeds up.

It's a long, sloppy kiss of the sort that makes smacking noises.

The kind that's too involved, too good, too once-in-a-lifetime for the smacking noises to be allowed to interrupt it.

"I love you," Kakashi admits at last, a little breathless and still without having actively done anything. "I sealed the foreign chakra, only that. I couldn't have touched your mind if I'd tried, it was too messed up to give me any idea what part was what. I didn't change anything."

"I know," Sasuke says, and he does. "That's why."

"I didn't do it to get anything in return." Really?

"I know," Sasuke mumbles again, speaking more softly than Kakashi deserves, for if he can love, because he thinks he might love Naruto, if he can love, then… then he might love more than one person, if not at all in the same way. "You did it because I might have destroyed the village and myself otherwise. I know; that's why."

Aware, obviously, that he cannot be blamed for taking something so plainly offered to him, Kakashi's touch is all over him before the last word is fully past his lips. The scratchy skin of fingers carrying the lingering strain of old burns finds his face, traces along his cheek and jaw and ear; a hard arm goes around his shoulders, gathering him up while Kakashi devours his mouth (with a focus rarely seen in life-and-death battles).

He is not certain how far Kakashi thinks he is allowed to take this, but lets the man push him a bit backwards and down. This is not fair, but what idiot plays fair when having the advantage?

"You do realize," Kakashi says, tone impressively dry and matter-of-fact, with the ever-present ironical amusement, pausing in his ministrations: Sasuke is lying back on his elbows under him, Kakashi bending over him, one deft hand slipping down his neck, beneath his shirt, "that Naruto is waiting right outside the door."

"I do feel his chakra, now you mention it," Sasuke agrees. "Whatever is he doing there?"

"I told him to get the hell out because I couldn't do anything right with him around getting upset and leaking chakra all over the place."

"It would seem mean to let him wait," Sasuke muses.

"Most people would think so," Kakashi agrees, smiling a little, backing off. "On the other hand you're rather a mean person."

He steals a last light kiss that Sasuke gladly gives, straightens.

"I love you," he repeats, as honest as Sasuke's ever heard him (admittedly that isn't saying much). "I had a good deal of confused feelings for you – before. Now I know, reluctantly of course, but I am sure. I doubt either one of us could change it."

He grins, his lips a taut line of resigned pain, an arc of melancholia.

"I know it's twisted, I know it's about things it shouldn't be, but the result is the same. I'll do anything I can for the child."

xxxxxxxxxx


	14. Let me be your Hero

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 14:**

**"Let Me be Your Hero"**

"I love you too," Sasuke says.

He isn't sure why.

Because it's true? Is that why I'm saying it?

Oh, hardly.

Because you have to give something to gain something? Because he's grateful, and strangely giddy with relief, and it isn't exactly pity? Because he likes to play with people, these days, and he can still break their hearts even if he's not allowed to break their bodies? Because it just slipped out, like some half-forgotten instinct? Because he's a stupid manipulative sap?

He isn't sure about any of it, mainly because he's rather skeptical about the entire concept of love, has never had an organic comprehension of it. His family was so difficult, and Naruto is hardly any easier, though for diametrically opposite reasons – but yes, Naruto would be the obvious candidate, the obvious hypothesis for any inquiry about love.

Except Naruto is something exceptionally basic to him, something that resides underneath the layers of words, and talking has always been simpler with Kakashi. The man thinks like him; Naruto feels like him.

"This'd be where I say I don't want your lies or your pity," Kakashi says. "If I were the hero of a story, and had pride and assurances." His crooked smile is back, black blotches of old pain twisting up his neck and brushing the edge of it.

"I'd never offer anyone pity," Sasuke says, and about this he is certain. "There's not a one who deserves it."

"I disagree," Kakashi says mildly, hand on the door. "I think there are far too many who do."

"You done?" comes Naruto's distinctly over-excited voice trough the opening door, words tumbling gracelessly over each other. "Did it work? Is he–"

"Why don't you come in and see for yourself?"

Of course, Naruto is right in front of the bed Sasuke's still sprawling indecently across when the sentence is only yet begun. His hand is caught in its movement, left hanging in the air between them, as though he dares not take the chance he might be reaching for the wrong person.

"Sasuke?" He breathes it arduously, anguished, like one attempting to draw air into his lungs under water.

"Ah," Sasuke says. "Yeah, it's me." He clarifies: "The same me I was this morning."

"Thank god," Naruto utters, in a choked rushed voice, and immediately proceeds to cause Sasuke to doubt the idiot understands ribs are not actually made of titanium and thus liable to break when hugged this hard.

It is strikingly different from Kakashi's touch, with none of the calculation, none of the instinctive technique, the utter certainty of how to gain whatever reaction he wants. Those who kill well fuck well, or so Sasuke's experience claims. Both arts demand a delicate touch, a body able to act while the mind is washed under by emotion and doubt.

He cannot deny it was quite pleasurable to have Kakashi's hands and mouth on him.

Kakashi who would never tug too hard, never go too fast, never stop at the inopportune moments.

(of course, neither would orochimaru)

He rests his chin against the top of Naruto's head (banishing thought).

"Remember to stop by the hospital tomorrow," Kakashi says, and Sasuke opens his eyes to look at the collected face with the sharp contrast between normal-pale and sickly-translucent-pallid skin. "Sakura thinks you've promised."

"It's unnecessary," Sasuke claims. What can they do for him there? More importantly, what would he let them do?

"On the contrary," Kakashi says, and Sasuke needs not ask him to elaborate, shouldn't have to need that elaboration at all: "She's still yours, and it goes both ways, more often than not."

(bonds never tie down just one of the connected individuals)

"I'll go," he says, sullen, and Kakashi offers a condescending, entertained smirk before he leaves.

There seems always to be a girl, Sasuke muses. A healer who can't heal any of the real wounds and gets hurt trying. Tsunade, Rin, Sakura. The broken third wheel that makes it so much harder for the two working ones to roll the wagon forward.

Kakashi's right, however. She's his. He might not like her, he certainly does not love her, but she's his.

xxxxx

It's a beautiful morning, Sakura tells herself. A splendid beginning of a wonderful day.

It's just a tad bit hard to appreciate it when the sun, instead of illuminating everything in a hopeful light, is evidently trying to burn her sleep-deprivation-dry eyes to cinders.

She finally worked up the nerve, close to midnight yesterday, to look up Kakashi-sensei's address and make her way to his apartment. The neighborhood, unexpectedly unpleasant, made her uncomfortable, but you do what you must.

The building was locked, but not worse than to let her push the entrance open with brute force, and she was fortunate enough to run into Kakashi-sensei outside his door.

"Sakura." Strange how his voice suddenly sounded so much more intimate, so much more human and flawed, without the mask between speaker and listener. Like realizing, somewhen during the early stages of puberty, that your parents are people too, were people long before they became parents, before they became yours.

"K-kakashi-sensei." Now she was here, she found she could not bear to inquire about the matter concerning which she had come, could not invite the possibly of a response contrary to what she hoped to hear.

"Sasuke'll stop by the hospital tomorrow," Kakashi-sensei said, clearly taking pity on her and fumbling with his lock (if i didn't know better i'd say he's a man in love). "Just be careful with him, alright? We don't want anyone hurt, and control's obviously a thin line."

"Alright," she said, the wild crest of joy dulled only mildly. To have Sasuke back changed has to be better, after all, than not having him. "Thank you, Kakashi-sensei. Goodnight."

She hardly slept, all the same. The relief was too great, and, when it abided, the resumed anxiety that conquered her in its wake. You have to be careful with Sasuke these days, indeed, careful around him – except if you are Naruto, because then it is apparently fine to scream at him, punch him and sleep with him by turns.

It makes absolutely no sense to her.

Then again, has Sasuke ever made sense to me? Really?

Perhaps not, but she was a silly little girl three years ago and likes to think that that has changed. This might be mere wistfulness however, for she comprehends nothing and tries not to care: any healer knows that more often than not, when it's serious, minimizing the pain is all you can do.

Work certainly keeps her busy, at least: the hospital is always full after the exams.

She begins by checking up on Konohamaru. He isn't seriously hurt, not as these things go, but combined with the broken collar bone and broken ribs the concussion warrants a monitored bed-rest (apparently hanabi caused a sensation by showing off her invention, a version of taijutsu that combines the classic hyuuga technique of hurting from within with the average model of causing damage from the outside). His friends are already crowding the corridor, waiting to be let in.

Sakura almost smiles, indulgently offering greeting and unlocking the door. It'd have been nice, if this had been a possibility when she was their age. When things were falling apart.

Clinically speaking there is about nothing Konohamaru needs her to do for him, so she tells him to get better and don't try to sneak out again today, and wonders what has happened, because she actually thinks he'll obey the instruction, stay in bed like a good mediocre boy, and no one her age ever would have. Wouldn't have dreamed of it.

Chouji's room is in another wing of the building: he didn't look badly hurt to begin with (and _thank god_ sasuke didn't actually put a mature chidori through him, and what the hell is wrong with life that she should be grateful one of her friends didn't kill another?) but it turned out Sasuke's strikes were amplified by masked chakra. It will be a week, at least, before Chouji's internal organs have recovered from the blows.

He's not assigned to her care, though, and she passes the room by, spotting Shikamaru through the window. Her destination lies elsewhere, although it too is situated in the wing harboring victims of fairly serious injury.

Ino is awake when Sakura slips into the room, timid and careful not to make noise when she closes the door behind her. Bandages cover much of Ino's upper body, exposed by how the coverlet has fallen down to her waist, and one eye is closed under the weight of a heavy bruise. She fought back more than Konohamaru, Sakura supposes, or else Hanabi just considered her a worse threat because of her greater experience.

"Hiya," Ino says. "You're late, Forehead Girl."

"I'm worried about Sasuke," Sakura replies. That's one of the best qualities with Ino, one of the dangerous ones: that she understands so much from so little.

"Sasuke and how he looks like a psycho skeleton, huh? Which part is it you're worrying about?"

"Both," Sakura replies, hiding her expression by bending to fix the sheets. "Kakashi-sensei told me he'll stop by today to let me give him a check-up, but that I have to be _careful_."

She sounds like the evil stepmother, vicious and betrayed and jealous. Loving, in a stunted, confused way. Much like Sasuke, then.

"Didn't you always, though?" Ino asks. "I mean, he was never yours."

"Not yours either!" Sakura snaps automatically, blushes, furious.

"You admit it, then," Ino concludes in a tone of great satisfaction. "But look, he's a disaster waiting to happen, and if I were you I'd keep my distance."

"Don't be absurd," Sakura says after a long silence. "You wouldn't abandon Shikamaru or Chouji no matter what."

"I think the key difference is," Ino says in a dryer voice than Sakura has ever heard from her; makes her suspect Ino is simply too tired from her wounds to get upset, "that they would never give me reason to. Besides, he abandoned you first."

She looks thoughtful, a little like she's preparing to either deal or receive a scathing blow.

"You don't still love him, do you?"

"I don't know," Sakura whispers, her suddenly-watery knees sitting her down on Ino's bedside. "I hardly know anything about love."

"You're the type not to see the good things right in front of you, aren't you, Forehead Girl?" Ino says, affectionate, sad.

Sakura looks up, musters a smile as she pushes pink hair out of her face. "Right now," because Ino's half-sitting and the bed is narrow, "all I see is you."

"That's right," Ino affirms, and kisses her.

Sakura pretends she is startled, and maybe she is, a little, because though she has conjectured it's a wide step between belief and certainty. She pretends she is startled and lets it happen, lets Ino kiss her, Ino's hand cupping the back of her head and the tip of Ino's nose brushing hers as their mouths angle together.

It's soft, sweet (a sunlit world away from sasuke and naruto and difficult shades of darkish gray).

Sakura thinks it might be time she took the easy way out, because the hard ones have never gotten her anywhere. She lifts her hands to Ino's shoulders and lets her lips part.

The light from the window has moved a few inches when she leans back, has moved on from painting golden specks in Ino's hair to play over her face.

What do you say, when you've just kissed your childhood best friend and teenage dearest rival/secret confidant?

"We're good?" Ino says; Sakura isn't sure whether the sentence ends with a question mark or not.

"We're good," she nevertheless repeats, finds a smile irrepressible. I can reach out and drag a fingertip over the curve of Ino's cheek, like I always did when we were small. "I need to finish my round. I could come back, afterwards."

"Off you go then, you lazy bum," Ino orders cheerfully. "Mind you bring some candy with you when you return. It's only fair I get all the benefits I can from being hospitalized."

"Though it means you can't exercise," Sakura remarks. "You'll get fat."

She laughs, the most inappropriate sound she's ever heard within the hospital walls, and closes the door on the launched pillow.

She's in the general office sorting through files when Sasuke turns up. She was only half expecting him to come, tenses immediately at the sight of him. He looks rather evil, standing nonchalantly in the doorway, and like he's gone without sleep for a long time.

He probably has too, between the morning sickness and Naruto.

"Kakashi implored me to stop by. Said I should have you have a look."

Shaky, because she realizes she is sure, she does love him, but she's afraid too, of him and for him both – shakily she tells him to sit down and describe the problem.

"I'm not convinced there is one," Sasuke replies. "But everyone keeps insisting I'm too thin to keep the baby. I don't sleep well and throw up most everything I eat."

"You have to stop training," Sakura says immediately. "Eat nutritious food, several times a day. I'll show you a trick to handle the vomiting – a chakra control thing, you hinder the muscles from pushing upwards. As for the sleep, there are pills, of course, but I think it'd be better to keep those as a last resort. Just try to relax, and. Um. Maybe you and Naruto could take it easy until you've rested up."

"If I can't train and can't sleep with Naruto, I won't get any sleep at all. It only works when I'm exhausted." His voice is crisp, impersonal (she wonders if this was how he talked to kabuto, but imagines he was more his old self then, snorted and insulted). Could it be he comes off as sterile because he is trying to be gentle, and every personal nuance he has is a degree of viciousness?

"Let's see if you get better from just eating healthily and not training, then. Should that turn out to be insufficient we'll look into the sleeping pills."

(he won't tell her about the nightmares keeping him up, of course. that's just like him: i can only tell you if you've already figured it out, and she won't allow herself to)

"Here. I'll perform a simple jutsu on you, and it'll be done. No more retching."

"Don't."

Her hand stops in midair, but though his reasoning is clear (i won't have anyone doing things to me out of my control) her argument holds true: "Only yestereve you allowed Kakashi-sensei to execute a mind-fucker technique on you."

"I trust him, to some extent."

"You don't trust me to do what's best for you?"

Pause, loaded.

"Alright, then." _I trust you to try._

She wonders if he also trusts that she'll fail.

His throat is clammy and chilly under her fingertips. A third through the jutsu his hand clamps around her wrist, gently but very firmly removing her touch. Funny that such a painfully slender arm should posess the strength her own lack.

"Tsunade was right to think I wouldn't harm you for trying," he says, quite calmly, "but if she imagined for a second I'd let you put a restraining jutsu on me she's more naive than even Orochimaru thought her."

"I'm sorry," she says. "I'm sorry you trusted me."

Because when she no longer trusts his judgment it's a given she had to betray. She isn't sorry she attempted it.

"What I trusted was that I could stop you." His eyes go red: "Just show me instead."

She does, simultaneously swallowing silly tears and saying: "That's the difference, isn't it? You can have Kakashi-sensei going through your mind and Naruto doing what he wants to you, because you can trust absolutely that they'll always be on your side when it really matters."

When he blinks his eyes are back to normal, cold, inscrutable (but not directly unkind). "Naruto has all these stupid romantic ideas," he confesses. "You understand, though, don't you? That I'm not the me you knew."

"Yes," she says, hoarsely. "But so does Kakashi-sensei."

"His priorities are different."

"He's… that's not really appropriate for a teacher, is it?"

Sasuke snorts. "I've no real problem with inappropriateness. It's a concept for small minds." He smiles, faintly, before giving an outrageous leer that is so horribly out of character she can think naught but that it has to have been a trademark expression of a teenaged Orochimaru long ago. "Besides, he's not my teacher anymore."

"Naruto–" Sakura interjects, shocked, and more disturbed than she cares to admit.

"…is the one I am actually living with, which gives him less reason than anyone else to complain about the situation."

"Wouldn't that rather," Sakura insinuates, "give him more reason that most to complain? You're not exactly a model housemate."

"Pardon? I cook food I've paid for and let him eat it, I demand no rent for his living in my house, and I also sleep with him on all occasions. I'm hard pressed to think of reasons this should warrant complaints."

"You also toasted his old kitchen, try to murder him at least twice a day and complain incessantly, not to mention you wake him up by being sick every morning."

"I never asked him to get up with me."

"Of course not. Why would you need to? This is Naruto." Which thought makes her sober. "Sasuke, please, don't hurt him."

"The idiot's good at healing up." His face twists into something that fails to be at all reminiscent of a smile. "Thank you for your advice."

"Not at all. I'm glad we talked."

He nods, stops in the doorway. "I won't hurt you, no matter what happens. I do not have the same reservations about, say, that Yamanaka girl."

"I see," she says tonelessly, and she does.

_Don't get too involved in the me-Tsunade conflict._

_Keep your loved ones away from me, because really, you were always the smart one, and distrusting me is hardly stupid._

She'll never be able to stop loving him, no, but is seems quite possible she'll grow to hate him a bit as well.

(fortunate and galling that i am so used to being helpless)

xxxxx

Kakashi decides he likes the Hokage office better since it became Tsunade's (the piles of unread documents growing like baby mountains on the desk, the old cups of sake-with-a-sprinkle-of-tea and glasses of pure alcohol). All things considered he might as well have been in his very own apartment, which impression is reinforced by the fact he found he didn't have any clean Jounin uniforms left, and besides he's lost too much weight for them to fit him anymore. Seeing as he's in no hurry to repeat the incident when his pants almost fell off, it was sort of a relief to have a reason to use what few normal clothes his closet still holds. Since he stopped bothering with civilian outfits in his teens, they're small enough to be the right size on his thinning frame.

"My, my, Kakashi," Tsunade drawls, looking up at last from whatever paper he doesn't believe she's actually reading. She's been letting him wait on her attention for something approaching fifteen minutes, but he doesn't mind. It's kind of nice, in fact, to relax against the wall with a smoke, forgetting where he is. "Don't tell me you're dressing up for me."

He snorts, which is not the easiest of moves to execute while smoking. "Forgot to do laundry, is all."

"You might not have the opportunity to wash during the upcoming weeks either." She leans back in her chair, sighing. "Sasuke conveyed a lot of alarming information, and everything we can confirm suggests he's telling the truth. We'll need to increase missions, and you know we're short on qualified ninja."

He dips his head a fraction of an inch in agreement.

"Jiraiya's still out, but we're pooling our resources to get him back on his feet. When he is, he is to train Naruto. I want as many as possible to pass the Jounin Exam. Since Sasuke is one of the few candidates who certainly don't need any extra study, it'd be foolishness not to use him for work. However, there is the matter of finding suitable teammates. You and Gai are the only ones I won't have to explicitly force, and I doubt Sasuke would agree to work with Gai."

"I see."

"Don't try anything funny with him, Kakashi."

"He'd kill me if I did."

"Yes," Tsunade says dryly. "Exactly. Here's your mission."

He catches the file she throws at him, nods, exits. It's an A-rank, of course.

"But I'm not even supposed to train," Sasuke protests, looking sour at the interruption in what appears to be dinner preparations. To think the brat cooks...!

"Sakura-chan said so," Naruto chimes in and adds, with a smugly victorious look at Sasuke: "Which means it's not just me being overprotective."

"It's Tsunade's orders, not mine," Kakashi saves himself by reminding them, sitting down opposite Naruto at the new kitchen table (get away from the stove, idiot, you'll ruin the food and burn us alive. get back and stay back!). "Anyway, I don't think it'll demand much physical strain; it's mostly about gathering information, so chakra cloaking and some ninjutsu should see us through just fine."

Sasuke snorts, in that way that implies that if he were anyone else the sound would have been a sigh, fastening a bit of hair behind one ear. "It's only I don't see how I'm expected to gain about thirty pounds stuck on a shitty mission in Water Country."

"We can talk to Tsunade," Kakashi says. "She's pushy about wanting you to work missions, but you could take some easy ones. The only reason she assigned this to us was because she couldn't think of anyone else who could work with you."

"She couldn't think of anyone else I could work with," Sasuke asks, not turning from his carrots, "or she couldn't think of anyone else who could work with me?"

"Both. Apparently the only one who's declared himself willing to take a mission with you is Gai."

"Right," says Sasuke, pouring carrots into a pot. "It's fine as happened."

"It's not," Naruto interjects, and Kakashi is prepared to give him right for once. "I understand it would be a waste sending Kakashi-sensei on a C- or D-rank, but surely you could go by yourself, or I or Sakura-chan could come with you."

"Sakura's afraid to be alone with me," Sasuke says. "You're supposed to train, and Tsunade doesn't want me anywhere unaccompanied by people she trusts."

"Did you do something to Sakura-chan?" Brow furrowed in apprehension.

"I didn't have to, did I? Unlike you she's not stupid or naïve."

"She loves you," Naruto argues, obviously at a loss, wondering why he should have to repeat this unavoidable fact.

"Yes, certainly," Sasuke says, fast and distant. "Itachi and I loved each other too, once upon a time. In the long run it doesn't mean much."

Kakashi sees his own reflex to wrap his arms around Sasuke and murmur comforting unwanted nothings into his ear mirrored in Naruto's face – clearly they are both keen on a snappy insult and a kick in the shins. Clearly they also both feel unable to act in the other's presence.

Well. I should leave then, obviously. Naruto is the one Sasuke has given the right.

Sasuke's kisses from yestereve burning with renewed fervor on his lips, he gets to his feet, raising an eyebrow at Naruto before glancing meaningfully at Sasuke. Naruto nods, smiles, grateful, and Kakashi gathers what little decency he might have left, discovers it is not enough and finally bribes himself with the promise of having Sasuke to himself for at least a week and can leave.

"It does matter," he hears behind him, followed by a snort and an insult and the sound of none-too-careful touches.

He needs to occupy himself with something, and some nutrition probably would be good for him. He ends up in a down-end but comfortable food house he frequented when he was young, after his mother died and before he learned to cook for himself. It is the kind of place where the owners did not care he was the son of a self-murdered traitor and a crazy woman who soon followed her husband to the land of the dead.

Once he treated Rin to a meal here, after she'd let him eat at her place; he really did not want to impose the horror of his home-cooking on her, nice girl that she was, and the restaurant was familiar and cheap.

She was kind, tactful, smart in the little ways that make interaction and everyday lies easy.

She wasn't the stuff that legends are made of.

(she was better than he deserved)

It might have been good, if he could have wanted that, if it were an innocent smile and a good heart and understanding touches he desired.

He just never fully managed to regard her as a person – she was a victim, a comrade, a face in the crowd to protect and impress. Someone who was his because Obito couldn't claim her anymore.

(obito at least was an annoyance, he and gai both were, and the fourth was an impossible role-model to resent and adore)

Rin never feared being left on her own with him, not because he would never have hurt her but because he didn't care enough to hurt anything that wasn't in his way.

Thinking back, over a plate of food he discovers he might be able to force down after all, it's pretty strange he didn't turn to drink earlier.

Quitting now, though, because there's no point anymore, it doesn't help, now meaning is back in his life and sharp.

xxxxxxxxxx


	15. Difference between Would and Should

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 15:**

"**On the Difference between Would and Should"**

The next four days are calm, sweet. Sasuke has apparently taken on the task of getting healthy as he would a mission, and approaches it with his famous killer focus. This, much to Naruto's content, means languid meals and starkly unbelievable amounts of rest: the first day Sasuke sleeps twenty hours, only interrupted by a few shorts wake-ups to repress retches. Five or six hours later he goes to bed again and spends another thirteen hours in dreamland.

Absurdly, it's almost like having a house wife, being the man of a trophy marriage; enjoying the rare chance to be truly lazy, and reluctant to let Sasuke out of his sight or even his arms, Naruto spends a rather astonishing amount of time in bed as well, but when restlessness calls he ventures outside, fairly certain Sasuke won't sleepwalk his way out of the village. Back at home Sasuke, mild with drowsiness, cooks for them (_i'm not allowing someone who can't even reheat stuff properly close to the oven, idiot_) smiles at him more than sneers (_I'm _yawning_, retard_) and sleeps with him (_come on, stupid, you know you want to. we already did it after i told you about orochimaru, no point getting hung up about it now. good. _oh_. harder_).

Sometimes he screams, and once he wakes up crying, but they don't talk about that.

Despite customarily being a slow study it does not take Naruto at all long to learn Sasuke can make the most incredible sounds if touched the right way.

Adding up the separate instances, he wastes probably ten hours lingering over Sasuke's sleeping face, mapping out again and again the reality of having him here, with me. Perhaps it can't exactly count as Sasuke _letting_ him obsess over his unconscious form, memorizing the features with his fingers and eyes and lips, but hey, the fact Sasuke isn't waking up is more encouraging than most anything else could be. Letting someone touch you when you sleep – there isn't really a profounder way to show trust.

Kakashi-sensei remains absent and Naruto is glad, because he doesn't want to be jealous.

Sakura-chan is a no-show as well, and this disturbs him because what on this earth could keep her from Sasuke, from a person she has loved and missed for three long years? She said, months ago, that she was over being in love with Sasuke, but they are friends, teammates, parts of a commitment that can't be ended.

Or maybe that's it. Maybe she is still in love with Sasuke, which would certainly explain why she isn't exactly happy right about now. He abruptly feels very guilty, has been so caught up being in love with Sasuke himself that he hasn't even considered Sakura-chan's feelings, not properly.

Unfortunately a suggestion along these lines leads only to Sasuke's eyebrows climbing up to hide underneath his bangs.

"You stupid fucking dreamer," he says. "It's like this: she doesn't trust me and I don't trust her. She's on Tsunade's side in this, and I can respect that but it doesn't mean I like it."

"Tsunade's… side?"

Sasuke sighs at his stupidity, grimacing at the food in front of him but chewing away all the same. "Surely you are aware Tsunade considers me less than trustworthy? She suspects, entirely correctly, that I do things for my own reasons rather than hers. She's also afraid I'll leave again, or snap and start killing people. I'm too useful for her to discard or openly quarrel with, but of course she'll do anything she can to bring me under her influence. It's obvious."

"But you won't."

"I'm not planning on a killing spree, no," Sasuke tells him with a condescending irony that could be Kakashi-sensei's. "That'd be far more trouble than it's worth – you heard how it is already, the entire village is shit scared and won't have anything to do with me." He shrugs. "Not that I blame them, the sad cowards. Not that I care about them. But it'd be troublesome if it turned into open hostility."

Naruto wants to protest, but remembers Jiraiya sneering, _Orochimaru's whore_; Shikamaru turning to spit, _Fucking Uchiha, more trouble than he's worth_; Neji with scorn and hatred and something like envy distorting his features, _Goddamn Uchiha_; Ino's sweet face twisted by concern, _He's not… we should give up on him, he's dangerous_; Konohamaru panting, _The traitor, how can he be allowed to be here?_

The rumors about Kakashi-sensei beating Gai-sensei senseless, in response to an utterance to the effect Sasuke isn't worth them, after all the years of lazy smiles and non-committal comments.

"Sakura-chan would never think that," he says at last, because it's the only thing he's sure of. "She'd never turn away."

"She has," Sasuke contradicts him.

"There's no way."

"Oh, really? Then I suppose her trying to place a chakra restrainer on me was just her method of expressing her deep faith in me, was it?"

"I don't believe you." Flat with panic, because either Sasuke is lying to him or Sakura-chan has turned on them.

"Ask her, then," Sasuke challenges. "Why the hell should I lie about it?"

"…Well I don't know! You don't usually have good reasons for doing things!" Naruto declares, though less haughty than he might have been from fear of what Sakura-chan could tell him. "It's time I talked to her, all the same. Suppose I'm going to have a lot of leisure on my hands, after you leave and before Jiraiya recovers enough to start the training."

"Get someone else to train with you," Sasuke shrugs. "I don't see why you haven't already. You could beat on… Neji or someone."

"Ah," Naruto says uncertainly, brief heat cresting his cheeks. "That'd be pretty awkward."

"Why? No one expects you to stand chance against him anyway." And Sasuke wouldn't know what that feels like, would he? (to be surrounded by the absolute unchangeable conviction that you can't compare, no matter what you do you'll always be useless).

(_your brother was always the exceptional one, not you_)

"Hey!" Naruto objects. "I won my Chuunin Exam match against him! Soundly!"

"That was a fluke and you know it. He's a Bloodline prodigy and a Jounin, you're the Kyuubi container, come on."

"Just because I didn't have talent handed to me on a plate! I could kick his ass! But, um, I'd… rather not be around him, all the same." Maybe he'd pounce again, who knows? If you can go from cold scorn to mind fucker technique-aided sexual assault, Naruto figures you can do pretty much anything.

"Might be worth it to beat him up," Sasuke muses.

Naruto admits a startled chuckle. "Why d'_you_ dislike him?"

Because let's face it, if Neji tried anything with Sasuke the explosion would have leveled the village (or so naruto dearly hopes).

"He's surrendered to circumstances," Sasuke retorts, as though surprised he's speaking. "He doesn't even know what he was ever fighting for, and he gave up."

"Yeah," Naruto says, shaky and considering. "I guess he did."

That Neji wanted something radically different from a marriage to Hinata is apparent enough, even to him.

_you don't understand this is the duty of one who carries a Bloodline Limit but I'm afraid I mean aren't I always but_

He remembers what he promised Neji, long ago, the promise Hinata needs him desperately to keep: _I'll change Hyuuga for you!_

It's just a more important promise got in the way, and what's changing before his eyes is the Uchiha Clan.

"If not Neji," Sasuke continues, breaking the somber mood, "then how about his teammate? That… Sakura-obsessed eyebrow guy, or their teacher?"

"How come no one ever suggests I train with my own team or my own teacher?" Naruto asks, only mostly playful.

Sasuke gives him a strange look, like he isn't sure how to take the utterance. Shortly he decides for the literary approach and replies in accordance: "Because if we went at it anything approaching seriously I'd kill you, and you'd kill Sakura, and the fields Kakashi really excels at are ones you can't learn."

"I'm not useless!"

"You need to improve. The things you can improve at are ones Jiraiya and Gai stand a better chance of teaching you. Kakashi's mastery is complicated techniques, and you don't have the chakra control for that. Or," he adds, studying Naruto thoughtfully, "if you use Kyuubi's chakra you lack the necessary control, if you keep to your own you lack the necessary power."

(his silence is sullen, he realizes it, bratty and hurt and silly)

"Grow up," Sasuke mutters, standing up from the bed and straight into Naruto's personal space. "I'll need to leave in a few hours. There's food in the kitchen cabinets."

"How long d'you reckon you'll be gone?"

If not for the solid immediacy of Sasuke here, held and his, the question would have been a stammer of loss, of fear too deep to ever be expressed, anguish. Silly as all hell, but what can you do? He is a child, after all, and love lets it show, startlingly.

"Week, or thereabout," Sasuke replies, nonchalant.

There's nothing nonchalant about how he responds to the kiss, though, for which Naruto is immensely grateful.

Afterwards, after Sasuke's made love to him and cuffed him goodbye with a final condescending insult, he searches slowly for his clothes, lost in thought, with a strange hollowness inside him. He recognizes it keenly: it's small in the beginning, when Sasuke's ghost still lingers at his every turn, when Sasuke's scent still clings to him, but will grow rapidly and torturously larger as time grows heavy with absence.

He smiles, because it's a luxury to wax pathetic romantic when safely in possession of the knowledge Sasuke will come back (i am not allowing myself to contemplate the alternative).

He might as well stop by the hospital and see how Jiraiya's doing.

Turns out the Sannin is well enough to be a really horrible patient, and Naruto is soon chased off by cursing nurses and by Jiraiya's leering advances and even dirtier swearing.

"Two more days," Jiraiya calls after him, "and then I'll teach you to beat the shit out of that fucking Uchiha bitch!"

"Right," Naruto says, and forces an encouraging grin. It does not feel like the optimal time to explain he doesn't want to beat the shit out of Sasuke. He wants to be _able_ to, the same way Sasuke can do it to him – wants to have the choice and make the decision not to, because you do not hit pregnant women and that's that.

On his way out he gets lost in the whitewashed labyrinth that is the hospital before stumbling upon a familiar face.

"Shikamaru!" he calls in relief, clamps a hand on the other's reluctant shoulder to prevent his new-found compass from running off. "What are you doing here?"

"Visiting Chouji," Shikamaru says, and he doesn't sound bored or tried at all. Sounds cold, snappy, like it's an accusation he speaks, rather than information. He nods towards the room outside which they're standing, and the movement too is jerky and chill.

"Chouji's hurt?" Naruto blurts. Why has no one told him? "But I thought your team hadn't had any missions after the exam ended?"

"We haven't," Shikamaru shrugs, and there's a strain to his voice, like anger, like bitterness, like he can't fucking believe Naruto is standing here saying what he's saying. "Mainly because Ino and Chouji are both still out on account of the Final Matches."

"But," Naruto starts, bewildered, "but Sasuke aborted the Chidori! He didn't use it."

"Didn't have to, did he?" Shikamaru says with something that isn't nonchalance (tired restraint, more like). "Chouji's insides were in bits and pieces after those nasty chakra hits." He shrugs, clearly a forced movement. "He's not one of the big boys Uchiha's used to playing with. He could have killed him."

"He wouldn't," Naruto says, but they both know that's a conditional truth at best. Sasuke could very well do it, if it benefited him, because personally Sasuke doesn't care about more than four people in the world, five if you count the baby. You're either his team or you might as well be an enemy for all the mercy Sasuke is likely to show if you have the bad manners and worse judgment to get in his way.

"I'm going in," Shikamaru informs at last, pushing the door handle downwards. "You coming?"

"Yeah," Naruto says, subdued, slinking in behind Shikamaru.

Chouji is snoring peacefully, fat as always – whatever injuries he sustained, it is evident they can no longer hinder his appetite or digestion. The sight prompts a shady little grin and a shake of Shikamaru's head.

"Come on," he mutters. "No use waking him up." He closes the door behind them. "Might as well stop by Ino, now I'm here."

Naruto falls into step beside him, thinking of Chouji after the retrieval mission three years ago, thin and transparent, almost delicate (and so utterly wrong). Thinking too of white laundry and blinding sunlight and Sasuke on the roof of this very hospital, Sakura-chan screaming somewhere in the background.

"I know you're hardly a flexible guy," Shikamaru remarks eventually, gaze skidding lazily over him before turning back to looking forward. "Fucking stupidly stubborn, in fact. Anyway, I'm not saying you don't have your reasons, questionable though they may be, but there are things you should consider." He blinks, thoughtful, hands slipping into his pockets and fisting, knuckles straining against the fabric. "Uchiha's dangerous, you know that much. He mightn't mean to, though personally I don't believe he's that considerate – he mightn't mean to, but he could really hurt you." He blows tired air out of his nostrils. "There are other ways, easier better safer ways, for you to get a lay and even a smile in the morning."

"Don't," Naruto says, because Shikamaru isn't the kind of person you slam against a wall, or punch flat. You don't laugh at him, don't stare at him, don't say: How dare you? Don't be ridiculous! _That isn't it._ You're a sad pathetic fuck, you know that? Like you'd substitute your loved ones for something simpler and incomplete. "Stay out of it."

I don't want it from anyone else, don't want anyone else.

It's Sasuke or no one, it's all about us.

It's possibly sick and quite probably twisted, but the three passed years leave no mercy, no benefit of doubt (i'm too obsessed to fight the addiction).

"It affects your reasoning," Shikamaru says. "Which does make it my business. I'm a Chuunin, I'm responsible for a hell of a lot of the people he might hurt."

"I'm a Chuunin too," Naruto reminds him. "So's Sasuke. You can't be responsible for people who get themselves hurt."

"Someone has to take responsibility," Shikamaru argues, voice low and convinced.

"Sure," Naruto agrees. "Sasuke's responsible for hitting Chouji harder than he had to, Chouji's responsible for getting into a fight he knew could hurt him, the judge and Tsunade are responsible for the rules and the match-ups and for not breaking it off sooner. None of that's your responsibility. It's the Chuunin Exam. People get hurt. 'Sides, he didn't exactly look dying."

(since when am i so defensive, playing devil's advocate, arguing for views i'm far from certain i condone?)

Shikamaru closes his mouth on what definitely looks like a retort, opens it again to announce, "We're here." The moment before his hand touches the handle, though, he chances a glance through the window, and stops. "Guess we'd better come back later, then."

"Huh?"

Following his companion's swiftly averted gaze, Naruto sees Ino sitting propped against a mountain of pillows, leaning forward a little ways with hair and smile and softness all over her face. Sakura-chan's curled up on the bedside, legs drawn up to rest comfortably among the sheets. Her hand is on Ino's knee, and if he isn't mistaken it seems to be traveling upwards.

It reminds him of the late-summer afternoon fourteen months ago, when he realized he wasn't in love with Sakura-chan. It wasn't that he discovered he wasn't in love with her anymore, nor that he discovered he'd never been – was just the dead certainly he loved her, just not furiously, she's not the one.

He hadn't ruminated on the subject for what felt an incredibly long period of time (certainly not since sasuke left, after everything became meaningless and that bleak pointlessness and surreality included her and anything naruto might ever have wanted from her).

She'd been sitting on a bench, legs drawn up then too, face tilted minutely away and an absent smile on her lips – sweet and sad, and she was beautiful and kind. A million miles away, inanimate, like an illustration in a picture book. Everything was calm, and simple, and the memory of watching her with lovestruck eyes was like the memory of the first time Iruka-sensei smiled at him, the weight of the headband against his forehead when it was initially pressed to it. Past triumph, past happiness, a bit of the childhood he couldn't have, wanted, has moved on from.

They've gotten to the stage where they can touch each other casually, in little ways, because they're good friends so it isn't awkward, sometimes it's practical, and they both know it means nothing. At heart it's empty, their nearness. Touching Sasuke could never be like that – in small ways, or with simplicity (touching sasuke was always significant, heavy with importance, inevitable with emotion).

"Guess we'll come back later, then," Shikamaru has said, and by the time Naruto wakes up from his inward musings the Nara is halfway down the corridor and Naruto has to run to catch up.

Because he still isn't sure how to orient himself he follows Shikamaru again, until he catches sight of Moegi's funny, beacon-bright hair and misses a step. Shikamaru sighs impatiently but waits as Naruto calls her name and asks what she's doing here. She's not hurt, is she?

"I'm visiting Konohamaru-kun," she says, looking up at him timidly, ready for flight.

He's surprised and scared for a second, then remembers his outburst, realizes it must have shaken them more than he could ever have imagined, thus proving his later conclusions miserably justified, and just feels sad.

"How is he?" he inquires, as though he were asking about a stranger, not because the answer bears any relevance to him but merely for the sake of politeness (i've never made that type of inquiry in my life, my god).

"Fine," Moegi says, still uncertain but growing more natural, more confident, as she speaks. "He's alright, mostly. They say he'll be out of the hospital by tomorrow." She chews her lower lip. "I'm going to him now, if you… if you'd like to come with?"

"Yeah," he says. "Sure. Of course."

It's a miserable decision. Misunderstand that reasoning right, though: he couldn't not have come. That was never a possibility, and not only because it would have been a betrayal and Naruto isn't ever going to allow that, isn't ever going to be a traitor.

There isn't a worse thing in the world, he thinks, jaw clenched around a sudden spasm of sickness.

What does that mean, then? That Sasuke did not in fact betray him? Or that Naruto is up close and personal with the worst thing in the world and rejoicing in every moment of it?

He shakes his head and struggles through the friendly motions that are suddenly awkward, like replies written for a movie in which he's playing a part vaguely reminiscent of himself but never truly him, so that the words sound just a hysterical smudge wrong, jarring falsely in their glossy chirps.

He's not the same person he was before, or Konohamaru isn't, or he's simply realized one of them isn't who he thought, and the evidently mutual discovery is between them like a wall of glass that allows sight and sound but no sense, no touch. No true connection.

He's connected to Sasuke now, more obviously than before, and it's taken more of an adjustment – it's also a connection that seems to strip him of other bonds. Too bad, and too bad I don't have any choice in the matter.

It is in a fairly melancholy mood that he finally finds his way out of the hospital. He wishes Sakura-chan wasn't so busy with work and private friend moments.

Thank god Jiraiya keeps his shouted word from earlier: two days later the man's house-shaking knocks send Naruto out of bed fuzzy and raw after a night of fitful sleep and long stretches of uncomfortable wakefulness.

They go deep into the woods.

xxxxx

Lee stares up at the blindingly blue sky, not entirely certain where his sure stride intends to bring him.

It has always had that effect on him, the Hyuuga Complex, as though he can't be certain that's really where he's headed. He knows he won't be welcome, of course he knows that. Even the teachers are treated with scorn – not blue enough blood.

Today he has some semblance of business here, though, and forces himself stubbornly forward; the guards around the outer wall let him pass, recognizing him as Neji's teammate.

It has become obvious (to them if not to lee) that their master is rather fond of his nephew, these days. After the Chuunin Exam three years ago much changed, and every Hyuuga knows the importance of subtle shades. Neji is no longer the remnant of past loss: Neji is married to the failed heiress, is the chosen heir, the future.

(lee, the scruffy talentless idiot with not a deed or a connection to his name, must be tolerated, though his forehead is unmarked, as is only fit for the masters he stubbornly refuses to realize he can't belong among)

"Excuse me," he says to what looks like a maid further into the complex. "Miss? Pardon me, but I'm looking for Neji. Would you happen to know where I might find him?"

Because Gai-sensei taught him long ago it is not the fancy surroundings that make a lady, and a gentleman isn't the one to whom people are polite, that can readily be inspired by fear or need; a true gentleman is the one who is always flawless, righteous, who never gives himself reason to be ashamed.

"In the dojo, I'd presume," she says, giving him a strange, wary look. "The big building over there."

"Thank you!" Lee exclaims earnestly, sprinting towards the indicated house. He desperately needs a good sparring partner, now Sasuke has returned this strong and Naruto too is off to improve with Jiraiya-sama.

He jerks the door open and unabashedly enters, but though the dojo is indeed occupied Neji is not present.

His wife's sister is there instead, sparring with her father.

Hanabi, Lee thinks her name was: he'd barely heard of her before then, but she made a lasting impression during the Chuunin Exam. On him and on most of the village.

_Almost eleven_, he heard her declare herself, but later Neji snorted and said she's been ten for all of five weeks.

During times as peaceful as these it's not a bad age to take the exam. Not bad at all, in fact. Pity she left in the middle of it, when word arrived her team had returned badly hurt from a mission and she shrugged off the later half of the Final Matches and hastened to the hospital. From what the lovely Sakura-san tells him she stomped in white-faced but got progressively redder as she proceeded to tell the injured boy and wounded girl exactly what she thought of them taking missions without her, and then fucking up and getting harmed to boot.

The anecdote suggests she is an insufferably arrogant bitch, much like Neji and what seems almost all Hyuuga, but also that she has a temper, a warmth, that Neji has never possessed.

Then again Hanabi has been cherished, has been protected and adored. He hears, and knows if he hears it the entire village must have, that her father went against all the elders and all the traditions and refused to have her branded a Branch member (he shudders to think of how neji must hate her).

Her Byakugan is darker than Neji's, he notes, and she appears to be pressing her father rather hard. Of course, the man is working his ways towards becoming elderly, and he was never one of the greatest Hyuuga (neji could probably beat him, if not for the seal).

As for Hanabi… she's interesting, Lee has to admit. She invents techniques herself, like Neji and Sasuke, like every true genius. More advanced ones than could be expected from a girl her age, though perchance that is not so strange in her case, being the uncannily talented Main House member she is, with the secret superior Hyuuga techniques that Neji reinvented taught to her in early childhood.

(lee might quite like to fight her, one day)

Now she stops, brushing hair out of her face. Abruptly, with rather an unpleasant shock, Lee discovers that she is beautiful.

She's looking at him, eyes back to their opaque inactivated state. Her father's too.

"Um," Lee says. "Excuse me. I was looking for Neji?"

"He's not up yet," Hanabi says (looking vaguely disgusted?).

"I see," Lee replies, politely but a little at a loss. "I suppose I'll try and catch him later, then."

"I'm looking for him myself," Hanabi surprises him by saying. "Perhaps you'd prefer to accompany me?"

"I – if it's not any trouble."

"This way," she says, and he follows her outside into the blinding midmorning sunlight, eventually into another building grown impressive from age, from the distinguished feet that have trampled through it, the important thoughts thought within its confines.

He wonders, briefly, if it's something akin to this that the Uchiha Compound must feel like – normally the place is out of sight and out of mind to everyone, but that has to change now, since it's become inhabited again. Maybe Sasuke will rent the property out and earn a fortune.

Not, of course, that Sasuke is in need of money. Unlike Lee, who has to worry about getting sick for long stretches of time because if he doesn't take missions he can't pay for himself and he does not want to be dependent on his loved ones' charity, he assumes Sasuke works only for glory and honor, uncaring about a salary he has no more need for than the person escorting him now does.

(person, because her eyes are too old for him to call her a girl, her body too young for him to employ the epithet woman).

Lee does not particularly care about money, but he can't help caring about the fact it sometimes seems you get either everything or nothing – people like Neji and Hanabi and Sasuke have talent and grandiose chakra, instant recognition, money and looks. They can no more avoid it than Lee can help envying it, even as he resents the jealousy and feels it grow keener from it.

They encounter Neji when he's stepping out of what looks like his bedroom, Hinata glimpsed on the far side of the not-entirely-closed door.

Lee has never seen his teammate in such private circumstances, without the headband and the bandages.

He does not look childish, but there is something worn mild about his softened pallor. Lee does not know when it happened, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that Neji has changed, fiery flailing and fight abiding into a blasé kind of acceptance. He and fate are no longer locked in struggle.

_I am coming to terms_, he said once. With what, Lee remains uncertain.

"Neji," Lee greets, filling the silence with an inquiry about what he was doing in bed so late, as it is plain he has only just left it.

"Attempting to conceive," Neji replies, absolutely bland.

Lee feels his ears burn.

"What are you doing here?" Neji asks.

"Huh? Oh," Lee says, remembering. "I intended to ask you to spar with me. It would be good exercise for both of us, now we need to keep up with Team Seven!"

Hanabi gives him something that might be a mildly interested glance, but with the Byakugan eyes it's hard to tell.

Neji's eyes he's better at reading, despite the surface similarity to his sister-in-law's, and they're colder now and cut off. Hurt, or as close to it as Neji is wont to get.

He raises an eyebrow at Hanabi, temporarily dismissing Lee, who seethes from it but doesn't interrupt.

"Fight me," she says. Lee recognizes the sentiment: _you're the one I need to overcome_, but also the difference – to him Neji represents the ultimate victory, to Hanabi he is a step on the way.

Neji sighs. "If you are both so eager to train, have a match against each other. I'm going for breakfast."

"Neji!" Lee protests, shocked. "You cannot seriously expect me to fight a child!"

"Nobody's suggested you do," Hanabi says. "I've been a legal adult since it was decided I passed the Chuunin Exam."

Neither of them has much choice, after that.

Lee fights his own resentment, his pathetic jealousy and hopeless envy-drenched dreams. He fights her, too.

It's all because, because–

Neji was hopelessly out of his league when they were ten, and, and…

She's better than Neji was at her age. Better, really, than Lee can ever be.

xxxxxxxxxx


	16. Where the Wild Things Are

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 16:**

"**Where the Wild Things Are"**

Kakashi leads the way into the wilderness, Sasuke temporarily content to follow the older man's confident stride through familiar overgrown paths. They might as well make use of ninja speed before they arrive in populated areas where they will have to limit themselves in order to blend in amongst the average people.

At evenfall they reach a modest village and decide to rent a room in the cheap motel; given the mild air and inviting landscape a comfortable campsite is likely to be stumbled upon by amorous couples, and Kakashi doesn't want Sasuke sleeping in a tree.

"Welcome," the innkeeper smiles.

They look normal enough, Sasuke supposes: Kakashi is still in the civilian clothes he's been wearing of late, without the headband and with theater makeup instead of a mask hiding his facial scars. Grudgingly Sasuke has conceded to help the inconspicuousness-effort by discarding his practical outfit for a silly one made for girls more concerned with their figure than with their freedom of movement.

Briefly, lacking true interest, he wonders whether the innkeeper thinks he's Kakashi's daughter or girlfriend. Girlfriend, probably: they're not that far apart in age and don't really share any distinctive outward features save maybe the pallor.

"We'd like to stay overnight," Kakashi says. "We'll be leaving early, but breakfast would be appreciated."

"Of course," the stranger nods. "One or two rooms?"

Fingers searching efficiently through his modest pack, Kakashi produces a pouch of money. The question lies in the air, unaided by inquiring glances. Sasuke's consideration is short; they did not bring much money.

He lays a hand lightly on Kakashi's arm, directing a, as he hopes, shy smile up at him for the benefit of the innkeeper.

"One, please," Kakashi says. Sasuke can't read his voice.

The room is modest verging on barren, but a ninja learns early on to value the essentials of a decent bed and running water over any surface decorations.

Kakashi places their baggage (sasuke's part of which he inherited when they entered the village because who'd consider it normal for a grown man to let his petite ladyfriend struggle under its weight?) in a corner while Sasuke lifts the curtain away and gains an overview of their outside surroundings.

"I reckon we'll reach Water Country proper late tomorrow," he says. They travel fast and light, and their destination is situated worryingly close to Leaf.

He hears rather than sees Kakashi nod. "Figure we won't be long there," the man adds. "Three days, maybe four."

Sasuke nods too, absently. Of course it won't take them long to determine what they can find out. This is light reconnaissance: when Tsunade wants in-depth information she'll have to send a team out for several weeks. Kakashi and he are here to scan the surface, nothing more.

"How do you feel about dinner?" Kakashi asks, and Sasuke turns slowly from the window.

"Grimly determined." The idea of food never inspires anything but stomach cramps and nausea in him, but if he has to eat he has to eat.

"So long as you're keeping it down," Kakashi remarks, and Sasuke inclines his head in agreement and approval of the lack of probing and babying.

They walk the streets with Kakashi's arm draped warm and lazily possessive across Sasuke's shoulders, because after the effort of shielding chakra and dressing up Sasuke'll be damned if he blows his cover by beating up punks thinking him a lone easy victim. Too-thin though he is Kakashi does not look the sort of man you want to try and rob, with the nonchalant grace of his steps and the eye-patch suggesting he's no virgin to battle.

Dinner is eaten in a shady restaurant. Sasuke knows his ex-teacher for a cheapskate of awesome proportions yet remains convinced Kakashi would have opted for a pricier establishment if they'd been able to find one. Fortunate indeed that Sakura taught him the anti-retching trick.

The meal is a largely silent ordeal, which normally suits Sasuke fine. Living with Naruto, however, has ingrained in him the conditioned association from quiet to something very much amiss.

"You finally have me all to yourself," he smiles over the edge of his dirty glass (not a kind smile). "And you have nothing to say?"

His raised eyebrow and softly ironical tones are mirrored perfectly, the harsh rawness hiding between the syllables, as Kakashi replies, "On the contrary. There is too much to convey."

Sasuke abruptly wants him. It's all but a physical force within him, the need to devour the bony interwoven fingers and the smudged edge of the sharply sketched mouth, the challenge and comfort, take it inside him and never let it out (to have the certainty of knowing it can never disappear from me).

Naruto with his fox-born quasi-immortality can be safely subjected to this mad need, too uncontrollable to even be embarrassing. Sakura might well give him what he craves, or worse, prove unable to hinder him taking it whether she wants him to or not: she has to be kept away from this compulsive craving at any cost.

Kakashi… he is not sure.

Sasuke has always been possessive, though nowhere near this bad. However he knows what it means to have someone completely inside you, these days, and is not fond enough of himself to be comfortable with loneliness inside his mind. Orochimaru, of course, is part of him in ways too complete and complex to be truly comprehended, and he supposes he has Itachi, as well.

Itachi whom he killed sawing life in him, Itachi whom he carries in his eye sockets and under his heart (he is not sickened anymore at the thought).

Itachi at least was someone he wanted once. Unlike Orochimaru.

And if he is stuck with a person he hated after and alongside loving, and with someone he hated all along, then why can't he have the few people he…

The people he loves, the days he believes he is capable of or willing to love anyone.

Kakashi's fingers dislocate with a snap in his grip.

"Ouch," Kakashi says mildly.

Sasuke is no good with tenderness, has never seen the need to cultivate it and can't regret this. With words a surface mask, closeness is usually expressed physically in one way or another, and the bodily contact Sasuke knows is violence and sex. It's as close as he gets, and he is well aware the same can be said for Kakashi.

His teacher's free hand gives his knee a warning squeeze beneath the table, and under the amused looks from the other customers he belatedly releases the wounded hand. Still mild, unbothered, Kakashi rights his joints with studied inconspicuousness.

"You done with that?" Kakashi asks as though nothing at all has happened, nodding briefly at Sasuke's plate.

"Yes," he agrees absently, gaze fixed on the undercooked rice and half-full cup of cheap tea Kakashi apparently intends to leave untouched.

He plays his part perfectly, smiling sweetly at the benefit of being the girl of the pretend (?) relationship as Kakashi's forced by convention to foot both their bills, clinging to the man's side as they leave the establishment even as he's certain the protruding ribs leave bruises on his breast, less resistant than the rest of his body.

(the innkeeper must think they are in a hurry to bed, the way kakashi's grip on him remains firm as he sweeps him past the leering man and up the ratty stairs)

"It's stupid," Sasuke says eventually, sitting cross-legged on the bed, staring intently at his fingers playing absently with the edge of the sheet. "The way they arrange the teams, I mean." This brooks no argument from Kakashi, who is busily searching for something in their packs, and Sasuke elaborates like a petulant child bored enough to distract himself with his own voice. Too bad he's far too tense to find it tedious. "It makes no sense. It'd be much more efficient to have a couple teams suited for D-ranks, and a few that could actually get something done. No one would have to get so hurt."

"They have these ideas about helping each other improve," Kakashi says. "They get over them quickly enough when they need to, though. Wait for the next war and you'll see." Having apparently found whatever he was looking for he rises, thin and graceful, a modeled scarecrow. "It'll be you and me and Neji on missions. Sakura'll be busy healing the returned heroes safely back in the village."

"Neji can't stand the sight of me," Sasuke remarks conversationally, rather distantly amused.

"It's to be expected," Kakashi shrugs, "what with him being in love with Naruto." He snorts, dismissive, in a that-poor-bastard way. "It's the one thing he has in common with his wife."

"Neji?" Sasuke repeats skeptically. "He's not the sort who loves."

"Neither are you," Kakashi returns, quite calmly. "Look how much that has affected your feelings for Naruto."

"I am not in love with Naruto."

I wonder if I'm lying.

"Sakura, then?" Kakashi asks, still mild as the absurd tease leaves his lips. "Is that it?"

Sasuke snorts. Falls back on the bed to distract Kakashi from the thoughts spinning through his mind. His eyes are carefully half-lidded to keep them private, but he knows his teacher has a knack for seeing through his little tricks.

That sick swelling possessiveness, uncompromising and owning him through and through, includes her as well, yes. It might sneak around the edges of love, he supposes, or _be_ love, in an entirely twisted way.

She wouldn't offer to leave everything behind to follow him into damnation anymore, and through the incomplete defiance she has become more real, a person rather than something to project his soiled family ideals on.

He finds he misses her, for really the first time since he left.

(in sound i could not miss anything, could not admit my memories of leaf existence)

Sitting on a motel bed halfway to the Country of Water with marks from Orochimaru and Itachi and Naruto on his body and inside him, with Kakashi's presence felt as a cherished, agonizing physical invasion of his psyche, his fingers shake and fist around the desire to map ownership over Sakura's skin, etch it into her soul.

"How do we do this?" Kakashi asks at last. "I'm not leaving you alone with the bed all night – would you prefer to share or take turns?"

"Turns," Sasuke says, only he's holding onto Kakashi's hand again, and not letting go until the man has shaken his head and sighed and crawled underneath the blanket beside him.

It's quite simple: Sasuke has always known the right answers to present his teachers with, and he should prefer to take turns.

I have no idea what has overtaken me, prefer it that way, though I am used enough to a shared bed.

(itachi, often enough through their childhood, and maybe because of that it did not feel as completely alien as it should have to spend those nights in orochimaru's bed. the slimy touches were not new)

Surprisingly Sasuke is actually more comfortable the closer to his bedmate he is – if he lies pressed against the other's body, molding into it, there is no way for his companion to surprise or attack him. Sasuke can feel every movement, every began impulse, adjust himself to it. Retaliate, if he needs to.

Kakashi chokes on an intake of breath as Sasuke selfishly curls into his side, face pressed against the edge of Kakashi's chest, one arm lying partially on his stomach. His toes claw their way into the hollow of Kakashi's closest knee.

He is lying on one of Kakashi's arms, its fingers lazily tracing the nape of his neck.

It's not a bad way to sleep.

And with the need for rest and the practice of sleeping alongside Naruto who kicks and twists and turns like Itachi didn't allow Sasuke even when he was small and it was natural, he is quite talented at leaving the rest of the world behind.

He knows this is not fair.

Do I feel bad about not caring about the unfairness?

He sleeps warm and comfortable, plagued only internally by unfocused uncomfortable unholy yearning stretching in all directions, for people he swears will only bring him disaster because they cannot be trusted to take care of themselves and he won't do it for them. Doesn't know how. Won't try, can't.

He wakes in much the same situation he fell asleep, nose buried in the space between two of Kakashi's ribs.

Kakashi disentangles rather hastily, leaving for the bathroom.

"What's the hurry?" Are they under some form of attack? Should he expect a sudden spasm of diarrhea as a farewell present from yesterday's dinner?

"I have a date."

"With Mrs. Palm, I presume?" Because goddamn him if he's setting out to meet potential informers on his own.

Kakashi's grin is nasty and broad. "Her and all her five lovely daughters."

Sasuke is torn between snorting and asking him back to bed, either for depraved pleasures or drowsy snuggling, hates his inability to make sense of his own fractured personality. A part of it that was once Orochimaru's seizes the opportunity to take charge.

He smiles a sweet smile of challenge and stretches, quirking an eyebrow at Kakashi, feeling his top slip dangerously down his chest, the edge of it catching on a nipple. "Leaving your helpless little girlfriend all alone? How cruel of you."

Kakashi can be as dirty, natural enough after half a life with _Icha Icha Paradise_ as his bible, with all the emptiness of the years. "I assure you you'll be with us in spirit."

Sasuke twitches forth some kind of expression, a grin of distaste, looking away and sitting up properly, reaching forward for the pile of neatly folded clothes on the floor.

Apparently, though, Kakashi is less adept than might have been presumed at differing between Sasuke teasing and Sasuke being genuinely uncomfortable (and rightly it shouldn't be a shock, since the line between the dispositions is fuzzy, they are blurring into each other, spreading as a single pounding uncertainty through me).

Sasuke bends forward for his clothes, only thinking about certain consequences of this after Kakashi has reacted to them. Consequences like his top falling off his shoulder altogether, baring a considerable part of his chest completely. Like Orochimaru's brand on his neck being shown off, the mark man after man has kissed and bit and tried to obscure with their own.

He felt so safe he does not react in time, or at all, freezes in a sort of absurd betrayed shock as Kakashi's hands find his face, cupping it rather ungently.

"Don't start anything you aren't comfortable with," Kakashi tells him. "I'd never force myself on anyone, but we both know I couldn't do that to you even if I wanted, so I don't need to be ashamed of trying anything with you. Do I."

Right, Sasuke thinks belatedly. The brand and the breast. Of course. Kakashi must assume I showed them off on purpose.

What do I do?

Last time someone launched himself at him was Naruto in their kitchen, but what he thinks about is Orochimaru: paying a dept, skillful unwanted touches.

Except there is that need again, that defenseless possessiveness overtaking him.

For no sexual reason does he want Kakashi's tongue in his mouth, but he has to combat the urge to do everything in his power to suck him in, devour him, merge us utterly.

He slings an arm around Kakashi's neck, a hasty grip that could tighten and snap the spine, bites back at his lips, hissing inwards through his teeth as his body becomes a string pulled taut under pin-point accurate touches.

One second more and there will be no turning back (sasuke really isn't the type to let go of family).

His free hand clasps itself in approbation around Kakashi's upper arm, leaving bruises in warning of the consequences of going further.

They do not stop kissing.

"Excuse me," a bored voice calls through the door. "You asked to be waked? Breakfast is served downstairs."

"Shit," his teacher mutters, standing up straight. "A moment."

Sasuke tells the persistent knocker to go to hell and dresses (it really does not take kakashi much more than a moment in the bathroom).

"Ready?" Sasuke asks afterwards, eyeing the other's chin rather than his face.

"As much so as I suspect I'm likely to get."

"I see," Sasuke replies tonelessly, slipping first outside the door.

Kakashi's sure, suave stride behind him hurries him down the stairs until his companion admonishes him to bloody stop moving like a ninja, and he curses softly, viciously, and stars swinging his hips with unaccustomed clumsiness.

"Good girl," Kakashi mutters to him in passing, giving him a pat on the head.

Evidently they are over the Latest Bedroom Incident, at least momentarily.

Sasuke isn't quite so ready to let the fact he was for all intents and purposes about to sleep with Kakashi go.

Still, other issues are more immediate. The pat on his head (like i were a bloody _dog_) directly appeals to his avenger streak, making him spend breakfast flirting cheesily and endlessly until Kakashi's gaze on him is dark with humiliated desire and impotent fury.

As they leave the overseeing of the innkeeper to venture upstairs and get their luggage, it occurs to Sasuke that this might not have been one of his wiser moves.

It is made explicitly clear to him that indeed it wasn't when Kakashi slams him up against the door before it has fully closed behind them. His skeleton rattles from the impact.

"Get off," Sasuke tells him instead of groaning. "This isn't a good idea."

"Is that so?" Kakashi mumbles very mildly, voice kind and interested like a good teacher's (and whatever his mouth is doing to sasuke's neck should be labeled a forbidden technique).

"Stop it," Sasuke demands, bewildered and frustrated. "You _don't_ _get it_!"

Kakashi's eye is unexpectedly clear when he looks up, meets Sasuke's gaze plain and assured. "But I do," he says. "Your state of slight schizophrenia comes through loud and clear."

Sasuke stares at him. My panting is no longer due to involuntary excitement.

Kakashi ruffles his hair, kindly this time though the movement is rough. "Let's get through this, shall we?"

"I'm not something you need to take care of," Sasuke spits.

The edge of Kakashi's mouth quirks upwards. "You're spending a spy mission constantly driving a colleague who could actually do you some damage before you killed him up a wall. Tell me again you don't need anyone to look after you."

Sasuke swears in a most unladylike fashion, fisting his hands in Kakashi's shirt, slamming his forehead to rest against Kakashi's chest.

_I don't need a caretaker or overseer._

_I need you._

So fucking humiliating. Leaving him so fucking clueless, so angry.

"What happened to my home?" he asks, voice vibrating its way into the flesh and bones he's leaning into.

Kakashi's arms circle him with measured carefulness, rubbing thoughtfully at his back and catching painfully in the hollows of his spine. He decides he might rather like that (the grip is irksome in a comfortable way).

"Nothing I don't imagine you've been told." Pause, then lightly, distractingly, "I was surprised you proved mature enough not to kill him for it."

"What?" A startle would have run through him, if he'd allowed it.

No answer, as though Kakashi is cursing himself and trying to come up with a way to have the implication unsaid.

"Are you – who burned it down?"

After some amount of quiet tenseness Kakashi sighs, "Leaf's number one prankster. Who else but our very own Uzumaki Naruto?"

"Oh," Sasuke says. "Right."

The one person he can't begrudge it.

Remembers kicking his parents' grave, his ankle snapping from the impact – _they never let me get away with anything, surely they must come back to tell me off for disturbing their things!_

Naruto, whom, when he is capable of it like today, he loves.

"Come on," he says, taking Kakashi's hand lightly between his fingers and looking carefully the other way. "Let's go."

"Let's."

The day passes as the last, save this time it is Sasuke running like a scalded child from fire, Kakashi following behind. Stopping for lunch is done only because Kakashi asks and Sasuke has a holy vow to his lost loved ones that requires nutrition to uphold. They pause at the edge of a lake – most all of Water Country is, as the name implies, rather flooded. Mires and canals map the sparse land, the woods thinning gradually, becoming underwater moors.

Sasuke props himself sullenly against the twisted trunk of a tree that seems more closely related to bushes than the proper trees at home (either of his homes) and fishes around in his backpack for his rations.

Kakashi sits down cross-legged on the swampy ground, chewing listlessly, contemplatively, on some kind of root. It's apparent he considers it a very poor substitute for a cigarette, but smoking is the equivalent of begging to be discovered.

"Sorry," he says. "I should have realized."

"What?" Sasuke snaps, forcing himself to throw the unappetizing food into his mouth instead of into the nearby lake.

"Judging by the moody puberty show I take it the Traumatized Brat is back in charge?"

"What the hell are you talking about?" Sasuke sneers, in the sort of level voice that announces Kakashi has one chance to redeem himself and one chance only.

"I remarked it's the Post-Massacre, Pre-Orochimaru version of you that I'm currently talking to." He drags a hand over his face, ostensibly to push hair out of his one visible eye, scratch at the patch covering its adopted twin. "What I did earlier was, I confused Pre-Massacre Needy Kid with Post-Orochimaru Mean Bitch. 'S what I'm profoundly sorry about. I shouldn't have." He toys with a cigarette. "Though I suppose it serves as good warning for you not to start things you don't want to go through with."

Sasuke has not been so insulted or astonished since Naruto was twelve.

"I do not have multiple personalities." Better make that a calm, controlled statement or Tsunade will jump at the chance to put padded walls around him.

"My mistake," Kakashi says unapologetically. "Need to remember your diagnosis is schizophrenia and PTSD, not MPD." He shrugs. "Don't fret, Sasuke, I know you're one person, just with… radically varying dispositions."

Schizophrenia and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, not Multiple Personality Disorder? Huh.

_(does it count as schizophrenia if the voice in your head is real?_)

"Really?" Sasuke says, coy, since that's easier than sharp. Since he utterly refuses to take any of this nonsense seriously (his blood is pounding with something not quite rage and the world is reddish). "Which one of them is it you want to fuck?"

He'd forgotten how fast Kakashi can move.

Before it was forgivable to do that, because however speedy the man's moves Sasuke's were faster, but lately he seems always to be tired. With the chakra sealing and the almost-coma rest at home his head is fuzzy, his synapses delayed.

"Which one do you think?" Kakashi whispers into his ear.

Sasuke is relived to discover it isn't sexual, least not to such a degree as perhaps it should be. He's standing in a forest with his back to a tree and a man planted in front of him, close enough their clothes are brushing. A negligent hand warm on his leg. Light breathing ghosting the side of his face.

They both know, of course. It couldn't be any other way.

Sasuke carries more knowledge than that, of the unwanted kind.

Needy Kid and Traumatized Brat want Kakashi in return.

However, Needy Kid also yearns for Sakura.

Furthermore, all three of Kakashi's ludicrous pretend friends, Needy Kid and Traumatized Brat and Mean Bitch, they all crave Naruto in unison, for different reasons but with equal unforgiving heat and focus.

It's a measurement as good as any, he supposes, of how much your connection to someone can take before it breaks, of which bonds are too basic, too desperate, to be aborted by any circumstances.

"Are you planning to try something before that or should we get going?" he asks at last, swallowing the lump in his throat.

Kakashi smiles pleasantly, stepping back to grab his previously discarded backpack.

"Tsunade specifically warned me not to try anything with you," he says conversationally, adjusting his shoulders under the weight. "Was convinced you'd kill me." He snorts, pushing more hair out of his face.

"I imagine she was," Sasuke replies blandly. "Did you hear about what happened with Sakura? No, never mind. Why did you ignore Tsunade, then? Like living dangerously that much?"

"Perhaps. Mostly I simply didn't believe she was correct."

Sasuke snorts, a thick wounded sound. Not fully aware of why, he snaps around, fingers digging into Kakashi's throat.

Narrowed red eyes meet Kakashi's dulled crimson stare.

"If I were you," Kakashi says mildly, "I'd let this part wait until I'd found someone else to help me carry our stuff."

"Hell," Sasuke mutters, releasing him and turning in a huff. "You're not even worth it."

Ten minutes' hurried walk later they are standing on a slope overlooking the Hidden Village of Mist, a floating city, suspended on a construction of bamboo poles, rocked by the waves of the impressive lake in the middle of which it is situated.

Ironical that such a picturesque pastoral idyll should have produced such an overwhelming number of names for the Bingo Book.

Not that Leaf doesn't have its nicer spots, and just look what a world of good that did Itachi and Orochimaru. Obviously surroundings are not that crucial to the sensitive young mind. (_needy kid, who wanted itachi, does he still_)

He cloaks his chakra with extreme care, adjusting the ridiculous dress, and mutely hands Kakashi his part of the luggage.

We walk.

xxxxxxxxxx


	17. The Floating World

**La Belle Dame**** Sans Merci: 17:**

"**The Floating World"**

They dress him like a whore, because no one questions that whores are needed everywhere.

Taverns, rich residences, restaurants and bureaucrat buildings, bedrooms and offices and hidden rooms – every door (save the one out) is open for a prostitute.

Pretty though he is Sasuke does not have the temper for this deception, but heavily cloaked genjutsu, whispers of illusion sneaking from his fingers, convince everyone who's paid that he is well worth their money. He has not fully mastered the art of moving like a woman, talking like one, but he does know how to imply a glimpse of bosom or thigh to compensate.

Kakashi is a less overwhelming pimp than one might have imagined, given his reading preferences, but they work out fine, for the most part.

Strangers drop money into the humbly grinning Kakashi's hands; Sasuke tolerates their inexpert pawning until they are out of sight; Sasuke deals with them, minimal amounts of taijutsu and genjutsu all that's needed; Sasuke looks for documents, memorizes texts, watches who goes where.

He leaves the analyzing to Kakashi, his mind wiped white and clean of all but the distant buzz of unfamiliar fingers on his person, stares that might have been flattering if he actually were the stupid girl he masquerades as, if it wasn't about eyeing an object for sale.

(never mind flattery. it's power to be wanted, and he has learned the hard way not to frown on power, no matter how powerless you must make yourself in order to attain it)

"Something's definitely under way," Kakashi remarks, rubbing at the flaking makeup on his chin the evening the fourth day. Sasuke has sneaked into the shitty room his companion rents on the outskirts of the village, is irritably rubbing mud and the memory of strange hands off himself. "I don't reckon further reconnaissance will justify the risk of drawing suspicion."

"Okay," Sasuke says, seated on the run-down bed. Its sheets are sallow, clinging like perspiration to his palm; the hinges squeak under his weight. Has Kakashi slept with anyone in it? Probably. "Good. Great."

"What's wrong?" His face twists in a peculiar manner, muscles rolling underneath the skin – the mark of a man so long used to covering his features that he forgets to keep them impassive. "Is it wrong enough I need to know?"

"Nothing's wrong," Sasuke says.

It isn't, either. Concepts such as right don't exist, so it only makes sense wrong shouldn't either.

He fiddles with the edge of his skirt. It's a searing crimson, a cheap sharp color ending halfway down his thighs. There are bruises on his knee, handprints sneaking up underneath the dress. He placed them there himself, since apparently one of his latest customers is known to mark up his girls and it'd seem suspicious if Sasuke proved an exception.

He has a large bruise on his face as well, left cheek swollen a faint blue from chin to eyebrow. Kakashi painted it that way with his fist, after some people caught them arguing. A whore doesn't tell her pimp he's not the boss of her – least, not without getting a healthy beating for it.

Sasuke considers them lucky he had the presence of mind to curb the impulse to hit back hard, swallowing humiliated fury and letting the blow land him on the floor.

Something he should thank Orochimaru for, perhaps (it doesn't even gall him anymore that he learned to stop fighting it, after a while, learned to keep his mouth shut and his legs open and count the endless seconds until it was over).

"Alright," Kakashi says. Sasuke wonders how far up his skirt his teacher can see, gray eye lingering on the bruises.

"Would you fuck me?" Sasuke asks out of the blue. "I mean, if I said okay, give me fifty bucks and I'll lie back on the bed, you can lift my skirt and do whatever you want – would you?"

He's very beautiful, cheeks finally softening with flesh to fill out the hollows, smears of dirt accentuating the whiteness of his skin and the flare of his atrocious, far too revealing dress. He's sitting on a shitty bed looking nothing like a pretty underage whore, his mouth soft around the edged words.

_Oh my love, where have you gone?_

There are certain tactile memories from which Kakashi's present is structured (the thick, galling physical despair of watching obito's death, which left me mute in all the ways that matter; sasuke's smirk breaking under the pressure of my lips). Many memories, little reason.

Reason, like most concepts (_family, decency, honesty_), is overrated.

Sasuke's gaze is dull and contemplative as Kakashi's hand comes to rest at the right side of his face, stroking through thick hair and over damp skin: it's hotter in Water Country than back home. Probably fortunate, since it was one of the convincing arguments regarding getting Sasuke into the dress.

Composed, deliberate (_fraying_) Kakashi traces the lax lips, again and again until they're red and parted. Bends slowly, indulgently, to kiss Sasuke intently while his other hand strokes up a mostly exposed leg. It's absurd how Sasuke lets himself be pushed backwards to lie sprawled across the dirty sheets, allows Kakashi's fingers high on the inside of his thigh.

He whispers against Sasuke's throat, "I don't have fifty bucks."

"It's an approximate figure," Sasuke says, voice clear and expressionless. He was looking at Kakashi but stares now at the ceiling.

They are at this point for many reasons.

If I am just a whore, then this should be easy, then maybe I won't want it anymore, he deserves it, it'll prove he's just like everyone else, maybe things'll be better, I should turn away from everything with Naruto before that can turn from me, see what happens, not let myself be pushed into this inevitable mess but go to hell on my own terms, get over three years ago, and – fuck, I don't know.

Except he is pretty sure he's on his back in a motel room, on a bed that has been through a hundred mindless couplings. Kakashi's weight, the warm planes of his body, the kind bony grip, feel like a different sort of certainty.

"What did you do with Kabuto?"

"Tsunade executed him," Kakashi replies, sitting lazily, comfortably, one straining thigh on each side of Sasuke's hips, the knees touching his chest. "Why?"

Sasuke contemplates.

Kakashi leans forward, slow enough it would be child's play to intercept the move, graceful enough it seems impossible to try and withstand. His voice is bland, bored, absently curious at the most. "Did you do this with him?"

"Does it matter if I did?"

"It matters."

"Won't touch me if I've been soiled?" Sasuke asks scornfully.

It's very embarrassing, but he is absolutely ready to sleep with him, wetness gushing between his legs, a pulsating beat thrumming through him, urging his thighs to part. His nipples scratch against the material of the dress.

"If it means so little to you that you let him, I might as well indulge myself."

"Orochimaru would have killed him first."

"You wouldn't have?"

"Killed someone who had things to teach me? No. Maiming is usually more than adequate."

"I see."

(silence, for a long, strangely calm stretch of time)

"Are we going to do this?"

"Do you want us to?"

"Depends, I assume."

Sasuke is quiet again, biting at his lower lip. Words are the most superficial level of communication.

They're in the real world, Kakashi and he. There is no Naruto, no happy endings. An end is simply an end, a non-existence: happiness has to happen before that. In the real world you grab for it without much hope of holding on, do things like sleep with someone you think you might have loved once, if things were different.

And I want to find out who I am now, who Kakashi is – most of all he wants something to tie them together, a knot too twisted and deep-reaching to be cut or undone.

And it's the bad things that bind you together, Sasuke knows that better than almost anything. Was he more closely connected to anyone than to Itachi? What bound him most intimately to Naruto, if not The Valley at the End, the words and the touches and the looks that broke them both in all the ways that matter?

Dirty secrets are the safest ones.

"You're doing this for the wrong reasons," Kakashi says, remembers taking Rin into his arms, gradually growing into the knowledge that doing so was mainly about being unable to deal with wanting emotional intimacy, translating it into its physical approximation.

Sex can be jaded, cynical – can be sweet, caring.

Remembers taking Rin into his arms trying to wreck something before it could wreck him, having to bring something good down to his own level of badness. Only it isn't Rin Sasuke is trying to break apart and away from (nor kakashi).

"Since when exactly is it that you care for the persuasion that there can be a wrong reason for me offering you sex?"

"Who says I do?"

In the end it's such a little thing that decides him – the deepening curve of Sasuke mouth as he snorts. Kakashi kisses his scowl away.

Sasuke's arms come up to twine around his neck, deft hands moving cunningly from there across back and sides and chest.

An honest teacher, a moral man, would stop now, and think.

A good man, then, can't have known the bitterness of passion.

They are in the real world, where concepts along the lines of right and wrong have no meaning but as abstractions (there might, however, be meaning attributed to the contact between bodies, skin flush against skin, sounds too bare, too basic and primal, to register as lies).

Sasuke is a little startled; Kakashi does it properly this time, long expertise in his hands. Of course Sasuke has known, intellectually, that that time three years ago probably did not show Kakashi in the best of lights, but this is something quite more than that.

Still on his back, dress pooling around him like the receding tide, he's trembling faintly and clutching hard, carelessly demanding closeness.

His fingers catch in the fastening of Kakashi's pants. There is no going back, and perhaps that's a relief.

I could stop this.

(i should stop this)

There's no way he will.

You can't make an omelet without crushing eggs, you have to give to get, and there are things he needs, and things he's willing to sacrifice. That's all there is.

Lips glossy with foreign saliva, he sighs softly as he is entered.

Why's there no active word for that? It isn't a passive experience, to receive someone inside you, only painted out that way by a language refusing to admit the act any will, any autonomy.

It is a weird, transcendent feeling; the closest he has come, ironically, to an out-of-body experience.

Filled unto aching with tenderness, raw and raging, mesmerized by the other's flaws of all things, until the explosion comes, mild and inevitable. No, he does not think he can regret this, ever.

(or if i'm regretting it right now)

He stretches slowly, pushing unruly sweat-sticky hair out of his face – really should see about getting it cut, its persistent advances into his eyes annoy him to no end and the cover it provides is a coward's. Rather to his disgust his hand comes away wet, painted a blurry rainbow. Well, damn.

Every morning begins with Sasuke seated on a low stool, Kakashi crouching in front of him with a pallet and painting his face. Sasuke's never learned how to apply makeup and sees no reason to stop refusing to touch the stuff, but has grudgingly conceded that it stands to reason a harlot would wear it.

Loosened from his skin now by sweat, fucking inevitable in this godforsaken Watery Country, especially during recent circumstances, the cheap products have apparently flooded across his features. His only comfort is the fact a brief inspection shows Kakashi's neck and the lower half of his face equally besieged by the glaring colors.

"Hey," he mutters, elbow poking at Kakashi's collapsed form. "We should leave."

"You're right." Kakashi raises his head, clearly swallows a laugh at the sight of Sasuke new clownish image. It doesn't stop him lifting Sasuke's hand, interwoven with his own, to blow kisses over its knuckles, bony and swollen from when Sasuke lost it and punched a wall but came back to his sense in time to mute the blow, stop himself from breaking the wall at the price of splitting quite a lot of skin.

After an initial scowling hesitation Sasuke settles for the path of least resistance and lets him, following the pull when Kakashi eventually sits up and tugs Sasuke with him.

"For your sake I hope your shower's working," Sasuke comments, stroking more dirty sweat from his face and shimmying out of the utterly ruined dress that still clung around his waist, skirt lifted, bodice ripped open.

"Barely enough water for one quick user, I'm afraid." Kakashi too is systematically getting out of ruined clothing.

Sasuke shrugs; hygiene is one of the first casualties on any worthwhile mission, and so long as there's enough cold water to let him pretend not to be a hobo he'll be satisfied.

By unspoken but mutual consent they amble into the miniscule bathroom together, crowding sink and shower and washing off as best as the circumstances allow.

Finally, post semi-cold water and the realization that perhaps he should be bothered about waltzing around nude in front of a man sexually interested in him prompted by an amused leer and a soft touch (he doesn't get the point because kakashi has definitely seen everything there is to see, and besides, what's a simple useful tool to be shy about?), he can be a boy again – at the very least, is at liberty to play the part of one.

Ironically he's found the heat is actually easier to endure when wrapped in loose fabric, thus eagerly accepts the street-kid ensemble with its layers of worn cotton. Gone are the attributes of a prostitute, the dress-code and vaguely approximated manners, and while his face is still too pretty there're bangs and filth to obscure it from what few people might lower themselves to look at the homeless unfortunate he impersonates.

He can hardly wrap his mind around what a silly freedom it is to run, unhindered and unnoticed, use legs and muscles for himself, not as something for others to look at with pleasure and ownership.

Not, of course, that he doubts Kakashi enjoys watching his back, for the few moments Sasuke remains within the other's field of vision – he's hastening across town, puddles of grimy water breaking under his steps, running as any moneyless child with a stolen treasure clutched close (in reality he'd be quite happy to chuck the pack, but he might regret throwing away the necessities later).

At the edge of the town-island he slows down, hiding himself sloppily behind some kind of fisherman's cot, where he waits for Kakashi to catch up. The man ambles along rather more slowly, back bent under a thick blanket's stench: with hair that bright silver hue it's simpler to hide the youthful face and wiry body, masquerade as a future incarnation of himself.

"How's the water?" he asks, half an hour or so after Sasuke first made himself uncomfortable in the fresh grass and headache-inducing sunlight.

"Dirty," Sasuke replies. What'd he expect, from the townspeople's sewer? "It'll do."

Kakashi nods, getting rid of most of what he wore underneath the blanket. Grimacing at the garbage flowing in front of them, Sasuke joins the effort, stripping down to mere essentials and fixing his luggage securely.

With Orochimaru's part of it temporarily subdued, Sasuke is able to strangle his charka output into a whisper, barely audible to even the most dedicated eavesdropper, but it is another thing entirely to keep it cloaked while performing a jutsu that will let him breathe under water for the next few hours. It seems he manages fairly well, however, since Kakashi does not call him on it.

(kakashi himself, damn him, is of course master enough of the entire business not to let sasuke even suspect the slightest hint of chakra, perched at the man's side and actively feeling for it though he is)

They enter the water hastily, diving as soon and as deeply as possible to avoid being spotted.

Sasuke rather likes being submerged. Sound is muffled, sight blurred into brightly shattered nuances amassing and dispersing at whim, movements slowed by the mass of wetness through which he propels himself.

He has long since memorized the locations of the traps and Kakashi's decisions about how easiest to get through them leaving no trace, and in truth the travel is lighter exercise than he had let himself expect. Some of the trickier hindrances demand chakra to be cleared, but they are far enough away from the village by now for that to be alright, even if they are caught.

They aren't.

There is time, still.

Not too much of it, though, going by the regulations Water Country is making ready to accept, regulations one would be hard pressed to interpret as anything but a sign of impending war.

Hours later they splash ashore, just barely inside the blurred border between Water and Fire Country. To be quite honest Sasuke is badly out of practice as far as swimming is concerned, and it was long too since he went through a training session without chakra as muscle amplifier: he isn't complaining about leaving the lake behind.

Since it's considerably colder here he also doesn't mind pulling clothes on. Real clothes, this time, and they can move through the thickening forest as real ninja – they're in Leaf territory, now. Mission complete. Will be home tomorrow, around midmorning probably.

Before that there is another evening, another shitty roadside inn.

"Welcome," the cashier smiles, a girl this time, looking closer to Sasuke's age than Kakashi's. "Two rooms and dinner?"

They look at each other (share a semblance of a smile though bitter, god, i have to look away). "One room's enough."

During this dinner, eaten practically at once because dusk is already far advanced, Sasuke is neither spazzing nor spacing out. Surprisingly, he's… comfortable, or as close to that as it has been possible for him to get, after Massacre Night.

The night is calm. Kakashi isn't cranky about them sharing this time, but given the fact Sasuke agrees to sleep with him three times before morning that's something less than a stunning moral achievement.

xxxxx

Jiraiya stops in a clearing deep in the woods, standing tall and something approaching regal in the afternoon sunlight, among the twittering birds.

Naruto considers for the first time the strangeness that he, the trash outcast, has a Legendary Sannin for what amounts to a private teacher. He used to be so jealous Kakashi-sensei only gave Sasuke extra lessons, still is as a matter of fact because Kakashi-sensei is Kakashi-sensei and even people probably better than he can't compare, but actually an objective observer would probably say Naruto got the better deal.

He also considers, not for the first time, that people age.

Jiraiya looks absurd as usual, but at the same time in a new way. The stay in the hospital cost him a few pounds, left him wrinkled and cranky, pumped with angry adrenaline. Left him cheated of easy grandeur and stuck in a struggle with ridiculous.

Yeah, okay, Naruto thinks, I'm furious too every time's Sasuke's wiped the pitch with me, but it wasn't fair, for all intents and purposes it was two against one, so you needn't take it so badly and you shouldn't have said what you did to him. Not like that.

Not fucking ever, in any way.

"Right," Jiraiya says. "There's only one thing to do. Ready or not, boy, we ain't got any more time."

"Right," Naruto mutters. "Wait. What are you talking about?"

He spares a moment to wonder whether he should feel smart or stupid on account of not getting it (wasn't all that coherent, was it?).

"That!" Jiraiya declares, and Naruto jumps backward from the pointing finger that would likely have been thrust clear through his stomach if he hadn't dodged it.

"Alright," Naruto agrees doubtfully, only gradually brightening to the idea. "I mean, yeah, it's like nothing that's been done before but I doubt it'd slow them down for long. The sight of 'em would be totally worth it, though. You're right, Pervert Hermit – the new plan to strike all of Akatsuki with diarrhea is on!"

"Huh? Oh yeah, that'd be _ne_–" Jiraiya stops himself and whacks his student extremely hard over the head. Naruto is at this point reminded there might've been a reason Sasuke wasn't all that envious about his teammate getting a Legendary Sannin for a teacher. Or envious at all, as far as Naruto knows. Not that it took Sasuke long to acquire one for himself. "Idiot boy! I'm talking about – no, never mind. Just show me your stomach."

"Oookay," Naruto says, an earlier conversation with Sasuke lingering unpleasantly in his consciousness – but come on, he's not in female form now, there's no way Jiraiya would want anything weird.

Also, wasn't I adamant in my claim not to believe Sasuke's ridiculous idea that no one helps you along for free? What happened to that easy resolution?

He has barely unzipped his jacket before Jiraiya is lifting away his shirt, brow furrowing in concentration.

"Prepare yourself," he says with seldom-seen seriousness, the kind inherent in substituting _boy_ or _dumbass_ with _Naruto_.

Thick fingers scratch over the bared skin of his abdomen, and Naruto's world explodes in splintered crimsonness, the color of blood too old to be chained by history. He is the death that preceded time and will live forever.

It would have been easy for him, any time since that first in the Country of the Wave when a sacrifice brought back something that should not have been awoken from its twelve years of slumber, would have been the simplest thing in the world to undo the seal inside him, release the Kyuubi bit by bit.

I haven't touched it. Thought sometimes that whatever Sasuke did in The Valley at the End had burned Kyuubi clear out of him, along with everything else that had used to reside within him, leaking out afterwards in inevitable painful chunks, bruised and battered and broken.

Now Jiraiya has done something to the key circling his navel, and Naruto is standing in the sewer that is his mind, deep down in the filthy bowels where the light is faint and greenish and seems only to be there to amplify the shadows, and he watches the seal on the gateway between Kyuubi and himself tear in half.

Not all of it, ohthankgodnotallofit, he realizes distantly as a wave of ancient redness, of power beyond the human circle of life and death, washes over him.

This, Jiraiya is quietly and clearly aware, could very well be the beginning of the end. Capital E kind of end.

Wonders absently, scratching at his crotch because you've got to live your potentially last moments to the fullest and this is no time for modesty, whether Kyuubi or Tsunade will get to him first if he's fucked up.

Of course, a boy who could be trusted to make it out alive of a forced fall down a ravine at the tender age of twelve is hardly one to care about the odds being stacked staggeringly against him.

Naruto's existence is founded upon blind stupid nearly damn well unshakable belief. He has faith in humanity, in courage and love, loyalty and truth and justice, kindness, goodness, forgiveness.

He's fucking stupid and doesn't bother denying it, but there you have it (a swift head, i think, isn't as important as a solid heart).

Kyuubi roars, laughs: _I _know_ humanity as worthless!_

There is no denying that Kyuubi must know almost everything. It roamed the earth before man was even a fantasy in the furthest ignored corner of the universe, unaging and eternal before the birth of time, immortal as time grows weary and weak with age.

"Yeah, well," Naruto says. He's standing unsteadily in the deepest burial place of the sewers within him, clinging to the prison bars, copper for some reason, copper as the hide of rippling flame Kyuubi has assumed, clinging to them to keep from being washed off his feet, down and away, drowning inside the power of the being called the Fox Demon of the Nine Tails, though they both know no names can ever begin to describe such an entity as this one sealed within him. "Well, maybe I don't want to know. That'd make things much less interesting, you know? 'Sides, it's belief that can move mountains."

He'll get through this, he realizes that quite suddenly as Kyuubi startles – after all, he's spent more than four years being part of Team Seven, hasn't he? (not even kyuubi has jack shit on sasuke in terms of being a stubborn unquenchable impossible _bitch_).

Even though he is uncomfortable aware Kyuubi _could_ move mountains, if it wanted.

Five days later (because kyuubi is aware of the voyage of the world between light and darkness if not much else, longs to light the shadows with its own flare) Naruto decides that this is getting old.

He's worn and bored, has argued and fought, fled and searched for exits, challenged head-on and sneaked up, hidden and shown off, yelled and pleaded. They are stuck, neither one getting out of the dark damp cellar because they are both dead determined that if I'm not leaving, no one is.

In the end the triumphant relief of victory comes only through the humbling stupidity of failure: Naruto has to be on his guard, keeping watch to make sure Kyuubi doesn't escape when his own back is turned – he has come to understand that whoever gets out of the cellar will get the body and the world.

A hundred and twenty hours is a long time, though, and sitting huddled against the bars, arms around his legs and ear crushed against a knee but too tired and listless to move, when Kyuubi's murmur behind him has become almost a comfort, he dreams.

He's not sure he's asleep, but he sees a dream that is also a memory and a warning.

There is no doubt left, when it ends, can't be any – half dreaming half not, Naruto sprints. It doesn't matter anymore if Kyuubi gets out along with him, the point is he's returning to reality and he's returning _now_, can't afford any other option, will deal with the fox demon if (when) he has to.

No matter the cost, he will open his eyes, and then he does, and sees the sky, bright and blue and blinding after days of dark drifting, funny-shaped white clouds barely holding together in the breeze, the forms of birds and leaves painting shadows across his vision.

He grins, giddy and serene, too tired to jump and shout, because his mind is the only one looking out through these eyes (i think).

"Naruto?" A bigger shadow leaning over him, jagged edges cutting away at the sunlight.

"Ah." He finds his vocabulary limited worse than normally by the enormous effort it takes to string syllables together.

Next second Jiraiya's hand clamps down on him in jubilant exaltation, and Naruto's weakness is such that the impact pushes him over into pleasant though not untroubled unconsciousness. he hears a last hearty howl of: "Naruto! By the gods, you did it!", and he'd have liked to have the energy to smile at that.

xxxxxxxxxx


	18. The Winner Takes It All

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 18:**

"**The Winner Takes it All"**

Naruto dreams that one afternoon just shy of eight years ago he catches sight of Sasuke when the Uchiha exits the school building, a gloomy presence walking slowly out the front entrance a good twenty minutes after the rush of weekend-hungry students has fled the premises.

Naruto swears it, if he ever gets a girl to talk to him for more than five minutes he definitely has to ask what is so goddamn attractive about a guy who resembles nothing so much as a stick figure – bonier than the anorexic women featured in the commercials, composed entirely of thin black lines and inverted white planes, and honest to god, Naruto's seen stick figures with more animated expression than those worn by the haughty-without-reason Uchiha.

All the same, probably he shouldn't be overly snarky to what might well be his one possible ticket to a warm meal and a comfortable bed.

"Yo!" he calls, getting up from where he's been sitting slumped against the wall, dusting off his backside and realizing anew when his hands come away grimy that the damp, dirty ground isn't precisely what you'd call an ideal substitute for a chair. "Hey, Sasuke!"

The sound of his name halts the little Uchiha's steps, turns him partially around, and there's really no one here save Naruto for him to fix that heavy stare of his on. It hangs onto the blond like a physical weight as he gives up cleaning himself off and jogs up to his classmate, murky water splashing under his feet, wetting both their shoes and pants.

Well, damn – screwing up Sasuke's doubtlessly expensive pretty-boy attire is hardly likely to invoke benevolence on his part, and Naruto doesn't have any ready strategy to let himself out of his own ensemble to let it dry. Soaked footwear is no joking matter; if he's fortunate his toes will freeze off before he can really feel the blisters, but that might be hoping too much.

"Uzumaki," Sasuke says at length when Naruto's laughed sheepishly and scratched the back of his head for a minute or two, searching for something coherent to open a conversation with and hoping the other will spare him the trouble.

"We've been in the same class for a year," he replies. "Come on, I'd think we're on first name basis here."

Ignoring, or at least not replying to, this piece of opinionated information, Mr. So-Called Genius goes on to ask, "What do you want?"

It'd have been easier if that hadn't been such a valid inquiry, if Naruto had actually had some justification for blabbering, "How suspicious! Can't a classmate just wander up for a bit of a chat? Where are you off to anyway, with that funeral face? Tell you what, I'll let you treat me to ramen and cheer you right up!"

The look Sasuke gives him in answer is so impassive it is actually elaborate, and it tells him something between 'Fuck off' and 'I'm respectfully disinclined'.

He obviously doesn't know what to say, because people brought up in those fancy-ass rich homes don't swear at anyone in public but they aren't polite to the likes of Naruto either.

Naruto doesn't get along with silence, though. Maybe I didn't always hate it, but it's been with me for so long now that hatred has grown thick and desperate between us.

"Come on," he says hastily. "Not like you've got anything better to do." Right.

"Kindly don't pretend you know jack shit about me or my business." Sasuke doesn't look angry, still sounds composed, but his cheeks aren't quite so pale anymore.

Taken aback by the reaction, then gradually working into satisfied, Naruto refuses to lay off. "So what exactly were you planning to do with your precious time? 'S far 's I know, your hobbies include scowling, snorting and sneering, and I'd think you do enough of that in school to last any sane person a lifetime."

"Actually," the Uchiha bites out, "I was going study, much as you'd know about that!"

"Figures you wouldn't have anything interesting to do. You ought to be grateful for my company, really. 'Course, I guess you aren't good enough to show off if you don't devote all your free time to homework, no matter how much you grease the teachers."

Naruto's shoulders tense instinctively as the last words tumble with stumbling nonchalance off his tongue, familiar adrenaline licking at his insides, because for a moment he's dead sure Sasuke's seconds away from punching him in the face. Then the other boy's posture relaxes, a nasty smirk tugging at the corner of his pallid little mouth. "I notice that despite the fact I've been absent for nine weeks my grades are still the best in the school, whereas I expect yours are barely good enough to keep you in it!" His lips twist meanly, into what would be almost a pout if it weren't so malicious.

It becomes starkly and unexpectedly clear to Naruto that everyone who's ever accused him of lacking self-restraint is very emphatically wrong: rather than hurling himself at Sasuke yelling and hitting and kicking and biting, he limits himself to a hateful stare, eyes tight with fury.

Amazing how much easier it was to think my hatred for this stuck-up bastard might've been a tad exaggerated when said bastard wasn't actually around.

His throat is stuck in a compulsive swallowing motion, his fingers twitching at his sides. He's too angry even to defy, too humiliated and furious and helpless to declare he's not always going to be unwanted and at the mercy of others who have none to spare, I'm going to beat you until you look at me without scorn.

Rage curls around hatred, for Sasuke and the world too but mostly directed at himself, curls hot and twisty in his stomach. He thinks for a moment he'll puke and wonders what would come up – has enough experience with the subject to know that sick burning darkness doesn't make for any substance to vomit, and it's been too long since he ate for anything else to still be lingering.

And fine, he's never been a fast learner, but with all these trials and errors behind him even he has managed to get and remember that fury might be hot while it burns, and shame might fill you until you're choking on it, but in the end they're not really working substitutes for heat and food.

He's pretty sure his landlord could figure this out too, but why should he care if some little lonely bastard has to go hungry and cold? Naruto has no idea what he did to offend the neighbors this time, but he's been chucked out before and knows the drill and not to ask.

(usually, though, he's got a little more of the monthly charity allowance left, and usually it's not the beginning of december)

He went to Iruka-sensei's to ask if he could stay with him, but couldn't force himself to knock. Just stood around outside and watched the lights through the window.

When asking someone, you can always be refused. At least if you never try you don't have to get rejected (at least you can still live on hope and maybes).

It's fucking pathetic. No, really – he's too fucking scared they'll turn him away, set in stone the fact he's simply not wanted anywhere, by anyone ever, too fucking scared to give them the opportunity to clarify their opinions.

Instead he figured he might spend the night at school – with luck he might've managed to break in, and if he didn't, at least the wall would save him from the wind.

Then I caught sight of Sasuke, and thought for a stupid second maybe there was a chance.

It'd be so expected for Sasuke to want nothing to do with him that he had assumed it wouldn't even hurt to be turned away by the Uchiha, the way it would have if it had been by someone who might have suggested in some small way they don't completely abhor him.

It's moments like that, like even contemplating trying to get on with Sasuke, that imply maybe people are justified in calling me an idiot.

"Anyway," Sasuke says now, chill gaze measuring on Naruto, "I'm off. I heard they changed the History essay into a group project, so I'd better get started."

Laughter flashes in Naruto's stomach, bubbles out through his mouth and nose like inadvertently swallowed water. Really, this is the kind of shit that simply does not happen to Uchiha Sasuke.

Except it just has.

"What?" The tiny arcs of the Uchiha's eyebrows rise higher up his forehead, in a gesture that is probably meant to seem detached and condescending but comes off as vaguely coquettish on his child-pretty face. Because of course the Bloodline prodigy looks exactly like noble children are supposed to, all pallid and delicate, and he doesn't have the rough, thick eyebrows of common people.

"It's…" He has to pause to catch his breath. "Your group – that's me."

At first Naruto's incredulity matched the one now painted over Sasuke's face and prompting another bout of hysterical gleefulness, but in retrospect he supposes it made sense to inflict him on someone who likely wouldn't have to be there to suffer through it – no one had ever spoken about it openly, least of all to Naruto, but it hadn't taken him very long to figure out something had gone Seriously Wrong in the Uchiha sub-village (figure out there was a chance sasuke might not come back at all).

Now he has and they have been assigned a shared project and Naruto cannot think of anyone he'd rather crush (or be crushed by, though that might soon be a moot point).

"I don't believe you," Sasuke says at last with a flatness declaring that's exactly what he does, what he's horrified at. "There's no way. There has to be some kind of mistake."

Naruto shrugs. He's going to wish, afterwards, that he was quick with words and had said something along the lines of, _Yeah, like your existence_. Torn between continued glee at Sasuke's obvious discomfort and humiliated rage that it's apparently that bad to have to spend time with him, he can't find anything to say.

"Alright," Sasuke says at last, sharply. "Fine. Whatever. I suppose it is a fair handicap."

A minute or so of confused staring, mouth not entirely closed and head cocked stupidly to the side as he gropes for Sasuke's meaning, and then Naruto realizes what's being said: I'm so much better and you're so much worse than everyone else that it equals out.

…Right. Guess Sasuke's thoughts of him are exactly what he's always assumed them to be. He remembers his earlier reasoning with a snort: _It'd be so expected for him to want nothing to do with me I assumed it wouldn't even hurt_. Hell, it does.

"Fine," he presses out. "Whatever." The words come out with amazing nonchalance. Of course Naruto has extensive practice in the field of swallowing insults with a grin, but he can't even enjoy the absence of the shaky edge he feared would cling to these. Go to hell, Uchiha Sasuke, go to hell with all your precious friends and relatives, go to hell with your loved ones and your perfect life and leave me alone.

"Fine, whatever," Sasuke echoes, contemplation of an intense kind in his dark eyes on Naruto and his face as composed and untouched as his voice, moved by Naruto's implosion the same way a mountain would be (fuck you, uchiha sasuke, whom i fought with in a playground years ago, who smiled at me for a second). "I suppose you might as well come along, then."

Naruto goes from non-comprehending to startled to insulted to excited to suspicious in the span of a few heartbeats. Eyes slanted in cautious apprehension, he attempts hopelessly to remain wary, trying to see what Sasuke could possibly gain from tricking him (save for a cheap laugh and really, sasuke's not the type to lower himself to that), trying not to let relief and overwhelmed joy shine through and lure him into agreeing to something stupid.

"Well?" Sasuke says, doesn't need to add: Are you coming?

Raised eyebrow, mouth twisted into something shy and delicate that balances on the fine edge between smiling and grinning and sneering. Naruto never knew the line between them could be so thin.

"Oh. Yes. I mean, heck yeah, 'course I'm coming!" Jogging, he catches up to Sasuke in a second; the Uchiha hasn't taken more than a handful steps, and those few were executed in a sedate, leisurely fashion, the way old men of station sometimes walk.

Naruto has the ridiculous, should-be-foreign-but-actually-it-seems-perfectly-natural impulse to friend-punch his companion's shoulder, but aborts the movement just before its execution because – because of something not quite clear to him, the hint of a miniscule tension running through Sasuke's nerves, making the fall of fabric over his shoulder sharper somehow, so the stark curve underneath seems fragile as a bird's bone, a bird's wing stripped of its feathers.

They walk alongside each other, through a village so quit now it seems empty. Dusk is tightening its hold and these parts of the settlement are private, exclusive (pace fast, hounded, sasuke does not look as his surroundings). Naruto's never been here before, his plebeian feet have never intruded upon the special soil reserved for the special people.

It's… sort of creepy, actually – rows and rows of empty immaculate houses, Sasuke walking fast and detached, tense and seeming unfamiliar suddenly here where he has lived all his life.

The house he eventually enters is large. That is to say, it's smaller than most dwellings here and no match for the apartment building Naruto inhabited until earlier this morning, but it certainly dwarfs most single-family homes.

Sasuke skids around a discolored splotch on the floor, snaps around to stare at Naruto with wide eyes and an entirely untranslatable upset expression when Naruto steps on it – didn't see what Sasuke was shying around until the Uchiha had gotten a little further inside and turned on a light.

Wondering if he's trampled on something exceptionally gross or something far too good for him, Naruto stares in disturbed fascination at Sasuke's wraith-like form. Even paler now, lined by numerous shadows, he looks like a child. Only then does it come to Naruto that he doesn't normally. A brat he might act, small he might be, but the impression Sasuke projects is that of a miniature adult.

"You stepped in the blood," he says in a very calm and matter-of-fact voice that Naruto will recognize as shocked years later.

That's when the insight hits him that it's all true. It sounds silly, yeah, but how could he regard any of it as real when all he'd had were rumors, words?

But the Uchiha Clan really was destroyed, and it's not just a symbol torn down, it's people torn apart. It's blood and death and it's loneliness, echoed keenly in my own existence.

"I," he says, reaching fumblingly for Sasuke. Stupid impulsive thing to do, because he's no idea what he'd do if Sasuke let him get hold of and touch him instead of shrugging sharply away. Naruto knows he should be more aggravated, should be filled with sympathy and grief and maybe anger, and he does feel it, he does, but foremost there's this fellow feeling, this sensation of a bond of some sort to tie them together. And it's new and it's there and I've never had anyone before.

He wants to say: _You are me and I am you and there is us. It's doesn't have to be me against the world for either one of us anymore, it's us, and the world doesn't stand a chance. _

(it's all about us, years later, in a valley, at an end)

His eyes are tightening in the hot stranglehold of impending tears as his mouth shivers into an extraordinarily brittle little smile.

"I too, I mean I don't either – I'm all alone too."

I feel it so strongly, at that moment, that I can't even imagine Sasuke not sharing my revelation.

"No, Naruto," he sneers, his face twisted and tear-less and he knows, oh, he knows what Naruto meant. Joy is short-lived, for Sasuke continues with the words he will have to repeat in The Valley at the End because they hurt so much Naruto forced himself to forget them.

His name is an insult in Sasuke's mouth, a dirty taste Sasuke spits out as he adds: "There's no us, it's not the same, nobody ever took anything away from you – nobody ever could – _you never had anyone to give you anything to begin with_!" He snorts. "You run after me like a little puppy-dog wanting to come with me home – well this _isn't it_."

He speaks furiously now, stopping momentarily to kick despair and rage at a wall, foot disappearing briefly into the resultant hole, splinters sticking to his pants-leg. "This isn't home. This is a place to live that I've made for myself, and no one can create home for themselves: home is other people, home can only ever be given to you!"

"Sasuke…" Naruto tries: Sasuke is speaking too fast, hurrying the words past absolute horror, and context is lost between syllables that trace their lineage to screams or sobs.

"I hated my father," Naruto can make out at last, Sasuke's voice slurring and bitter and mercilessly impossible not to hear. "I hated my brother. I even hated my mother. I hated all of them!"

Naruto (lonely rejected naruto who might not be unquenchable after all) doesn't know what to do, is caught and desperate with his inadequate hand hard on Sasuke's arm and the recognition of how love breeds hatred masking more love. Never ceasing to look absolutely furious with himself and the world Sasuke snorts and shrugs loose, but it seems his legs will not carry him all the way to the next room, because he sinks to the floor halfway there, slow and reluctant, and he does not get up again, just curls a back taut with humiliation to Naruto and lies on his side.

(the world is red and i do not care)

(home is in the darkness now)

(what are you doing here, uzumaki naruto?)

Soft sounds that Naruto chooses to interpret as snores because the alternative is simply too mind-boggling to contemplate, and he shrugs and figures what the hell. Warmth and shelter are what they are, and treasured: he too curls up with his spine pressed against Sasuke's corresponding column of bone on the rough floor.

In the middle of the night movement wakes him up; Sasuke has twisted over onto his back and abruptly sits up, his skin so pale it actually brings a bit of light into the windowless darkness. Without a word he hurries to his feet, nimbly now, and disappears through the doorway, further into the empty dwelling.

Naruto is barely halfway conscious, not quite awake enough to realize he can move, and a few minutes later Sasuke's back. Probably convinced Naruto's still sound asleep the (only) Uchiha stands over him for a moment before dropping a heavy blanket atop him. Appreciative of its thick softness Naruto buries his nose in its unfamiliar scent and falls back asleep in the span of a handful seconds.

The next morning he pushes the fabric aside and looks around the large dark-ish room in momentary confusion, wondering where the hell he is. Sasuke's footsteps in the adjourning room call forth remembrance, and in uncertainty he remains sitting there on the floor with the blanket pooling around his waist.

Noise from the other side of the wall, fabric rustling and cupboards opening and closing, then an immaculately styled, skeletal Sasuke enters. He's walking fast again, and without looking at anything, least of all the tray he carries.

"Here," he says, putting it down beside Naruto.

Eyes studying him, mouth shaping discarded word after discarded word, Naruto has no time to say anything before Sasuke's straightened, fixed the school-bag slung elegantly over his shoulder, and leaves, closing the door softly behind him and locking it.

At this point in his life there is nothing short of death that can put a hamper on Naruto's appetite, and it wasn't exactly yesterday he was treated to a free breakfast. The milk and bread and rice and egg make a comfortable lump of warmth in his stomach. Eventually he ventures further inside the abandoned house to leave the tray on the sink before he too departs, curiosity unaccustomedly curbed by the ghosts lingering (around sasuke if not in the house itself).

Afterwards pale sunlight lights his way: he's hours late for class and no one's surprised, for really, nothing has changed. He never spoke to Sasuke and Sasuke never brought him home and never raged and never hurt and Naruto never slept with Sasuke's mirroring brittle bony warmth pressed against him.

He gets his first A one and a half week later, the one good grade he's ever gotten, the one that saves him from doing the year over again, without having looked at the assignment, much less having handed anything in.

"Sasuke," he mumbles, seven years later and more, awakening for the second time after a Legendary Sannin with a penchant for the dirty tricked him and let loose the monster confined inside of him (after i won).

"That's right," a gruff, touched voice says further up and to the left: he cracks his eyes open a slit, recognizes the bulky shape as Jiraiya's. "You're only a few steps away from giving that little horror what he deserves. Bit more training with the new chakra and we'll finally have someone who can stop him when he goes off the deep end."

His body feels brittle, worn thin, like it might snap under the lightest weight, bones breaking under the force of muscle and flesh. Gradually, careful like with an egg or a newborn bird, Naruto eases himself upright, sitting with great gentleness.

"That's not it," he says. "I don't want to fight Sasuke. Or, maybe I do, but not now, not like that. I want to _protect_ Sasuke."

Jiraiya stares at him, incredulous.

Flushing, Naruto continues, "Look, you don't have to say it, I know he can beat up most anyone he wants. That's not what I meant. It's – I want him to be able to count on me, want us to count on each other." He huffs, rubbing at his forehead – his skull feels even more like it might shatter than the rest of him, like a haphazard framework around the overwhelming presence and power of Kyuubi there inside it. "That's the only reason I'm not practicing the new charka on you! How could – you should have bloody well asked me, before you did anything like that!"

"Yeah well," Jiraiya shrugs unapologetically, tipping a flask back for a large gulp of what smells like sake. Naruto has no time to think about what it means that he can identify the liquor by scent from several meters' distance, just now. "Easier to gain forgiveness than permission, y'know."

In a movement like that of lightning, like that of the tide (one that waits for no man, unstoppable and accurate in its cruel jaded chanciness) Naruto has the other man slammed backwards, right hand fisted in Jiraiya's shirt, the left one's fingers white and shaking around the Sannin's throat. It is as though he is suddenly imbued on a cellular level with the knowledge he should have taken to heart long since, an awareness that makes it irrelevant whether the move will break his body: whatever happens, it will be repaired.

A being such as the Fox Demon of the Nine Tails will not allow mere physical death to stand opposing in its way.

Sasuke's touched my heart, he remembers suddenly. Really, literally touched his heart. The fingers on the muscle, through the muscle, and the fuzzy fractured afterimage of what death feels like – a tactile flashback shocks through him, relocates his strangling hand from Jiraiya's windpipe to clutching at his own chest.

I could cry.

Don't have the time.

He's still crouched astride the Sannin, who was knocked backwards by Naruto's pounce (he must be faster, then, given that sasuke managed to run from him on the water, at the end of all things).

"You had no fucking right!" he sneers, and it's a hiss, a muted howl: much more the words of a creature of capricious instinct locked tight inside a shell of mortality than of a boy who's on and off been relived that people care enough, at least, to make decisions over his head.

"Grow up," Jiraiya tells him, sounding solemn for once, authoritative. Sensible, goddamn him. "This isn't about you, you spoiled brat! This is about a demon god who could wipe out far more than a single ninja village. With a war looming over us and a too fucking powerful traitor in our midst, you really think anyone has time to consider your feelings? You think you have any _right_ to deny everyone else hope?"

So maybe Naruto isn't ready to answer that.

"No one talks about Sasuke that way but me!"

(don't tell me things i don't want to hear about him, i'm the one he betrayed, leave us be)

He's all fury now, easy and burning him through and through. Flames are catching, and Jiraiya is close, convinient.

He doesn't seem afraid, though, the Sannin. Naruto will realize that with gratitude later (_he trusts me_), but now is not later.

"Not you too," Jiraiya says in horror of a far different kind instead of being scared or minding the manhandling. "What is with that puny tramp and seducing every worthwhile man he comes across? Bad enough about Kakashi, but you too – it can't be right."

"Wha… wait!" Naruto flounders, catches himself, calms. Grows into another kind of agitation.

First off he scrambles to his feet, flushing and offering Jiraiya a hand up, gratified to have the large gravelly limb close around his, find the strength to pull the elder man to his feet. "Sorry about that."

"No harm done," Jiraiya shrugs. "I'm sorry too, for what it's worth, that things have to be the way they are."

"Alright," Naruto says, biting his lip, because holding grudges is an alien concept and certain things have to be done. Doesn't mean he has to like it, but acceptance is different from that. He's learned that, at least. "But what were you saying about – about Kakashi-sensei?"

A fat white eyebrow climbs towards a likewise white hairline. "You haven't noticed Kakashi too is dying to shag Orochimaru's leftovers?" He snorts. "Wistfully denied it myself, but that gets old after a while. Expect that's what he doing right about now, in fact. Shagging leftovers, I mean."

It's the first time ever Naruto has seen Jiraiya look disgusted due to thoughts of sex, but this landmark in history is rather overshadowed by personal outrage.

"He is not!"

He is not shagging Sasuke, because he doesn't want to, and Sasuke doesn't want to, and there's no way they would ever.

Jiraiya simply snorts at him, scornful and pitying in almost equal measures. Shakes his head.

"He isn't!" Naruto cries (sees kakashi's hands on sasuke's body, sasuke's smile at kakashi, kakashi almost naked and sasuke unbothered, sasuke practically swooning into kakashi's arms, kakashi performing an approved mind-fucker jutsu on sasuke, fixing what naruto couldn't even ease, sees trust and touches and red rage and cold certainty and searing sadness).

"I'm not the one you want for this," Jiraiya takes mercy and tells him, and Naruto nods and breaks, the forest a blur around his pounding footsteps as he runs.

No, Jiraiya isn't the one.

The person he wants right now is in the hospital where she works, standing on tip-toe to reach for files on a topmost shelf.

"Sakura?" one of her co-workers asks from the doorway, sounding rather troubled in a nose-pinching way: worse than _the file system has been messed up _again_, damn those sloppy nurses_ but less terrible than _a new bunch of victims in the ER, don't think we'll be able to save many of them but come _quick. "Your teammate is here to see you."

Sakura follows quickly and quietly behind the sturdier woman, mind working in neglected overdrive to play through a thousand scenarios. Who's hurt, how badly, why?

The sight of Naruto going to pieces on the visitor side of the reception desk gives her the momentary horrible idea he's here to tell her Sasuke's dead.

"Naruto?" Maybe she's brave after all, because she speaks into the stillness.

"Sakura-chan!" And she has never felt so inadequate with dying patients as she does faced with the impossible trust in Naruto's voice. "Need to talk. Alone. Now."

"Of course," she says at once, reaching out a tentative hand that he snags onto, locking short fingers around her wrist. "This way."

She leads him into the gigantic office from which she was fetched; the archive was getting crowded, and empty offices have been scarified as storage space. Cases dating between five and two years back are found here, among the staggering heaps of documentation.

She pushes him kindly down into the single chair, wincing as her hands are slapped with what feels almost like an electrical shock at the contact. What is with Naruto's chakra, billowing around him like a torn upset cloak?

(this isn't the time)

"Naruto," she says again, sitting down carefully on the desk. "What is it? What's happened?" _What's wrong? _except I dare not say that.

Looking wretched and ashamed he sprouts an involved, incoherent but sadly comprehensible tale about Jiraiya saying about Kakashi and Sasuke.

"I know," she says mildly. "It disturbed me too, and so I – investigated."

She searches in a drawer for where she knows the correct file is, hesitates momentarily before shaking her head ruefully and handing it over.

"I suppose it's considerably more your business than mine. Here."

Naruto accepts the papers, brow furrowed in stark incomprehension. What has this got to do with anything? Listlessly he opens the file, eyes snagging on a date scribbled in the upper right margin.

_Three years ago, and somewhen before Sasuke left? Must've been – during the Chuunin Exam, just before the Final Matches started._

The text is blurry, sketchy, but unmercifully blunt.

_U. S. (Genin, T:7) brought in very late by H. K. (Jounin instr., T:7). Matter handled discreetly. Subject taken care of by A. Y. Some muscle strains and nasty abrasions, most pronounced on stomach, arms and thighs, and severe damage to rectum. Inexpert healing jutsu had been employed to stop the worst of the bleeding, but considerable attention was necessary. Subject was released four hours later and left accompanied by H. K._

"No," Naruto says without thought. "You can't – it has to be a mistake."

xxxxxxxxxx


	19. Running Blind

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 19:**

"**Running Blind"**

Sakura-chan shakes her head sadly. "I'm afraid it's not."

"What, then? The hospital you work for covered up a child getting raped, let the perpetrator walk? Is that what you're trying to say?" His voice rises hysterically over the last syllables.

"Not necessarily," she says, sighs. "Look, I'm not defending the hospital's decision, but you know as well as I do that Sasuke wasn't a child at twelve, and you also know he would never have wanted anyone to know."

Naruto looks like he's been struck (had carefully avoided connecting _u. s. (genin, t;7),_ a child who existed three years ago and was brought to the hospital with a damaged rectum, to sasuke. to a real, living sasuke; to _our_ sasuke).

"I don't care!" he says, sneer shading into scream. "What Sasuke wants and what's good for him rarely if ever coincide! We can't just let a child rapist walk around free! It doesn't matter what anyone wants, that's _wrong_!"

"Calm down," Sakura-chan orders, and her voice is tired and thin and hard. "I'm far from sure rape is the correct word. Look, think about it – he's not scared of Kakashi-sensei, not angry, hell, he _trusts_ him. Does that suggest to you it was simply a thorough violation?"

"Kakashi?" Naruto repeats in a voice of incredulous horror, the kind of disgust that is wont to turn physical, press vomit upwards through your throat.

"Who else? Honestly, Naruto." She knows she should not say this, but there has to be limits to fantasy, to kind and not so kind lies. "Who else could it possibly be? You imagine Kakashi-sensei would allow some random stranger to assault Sasuke?"

"No. But then – what have I missed? What other way is there to get that kind of injury?"

"None that I can think of. I, don't start interrogating me, Naruto – ask Sasuke instead. I'd say he's the only one who knows what really happened. Still, I consider it a justified conclusion that they… engaged in intercourse, and that Kakashi," and alright, I'm dropping the honorific, "that he was – considerably rougher than is healthy."

Wasn't the last, either, I don't think, which is even more disturbing.

She keeps private her suspicion Sasuke isn't entirely adverse to that – obviously he's comfortable enough around Kakashi these days, and she's seen the bruises Naruto's left on him. After Orochimaru, while no less tragic, it's not so surprising.

On the other hand he was twelve when this happened. Twelve, she reminds herself, and he might be Sasuke but he was still innocent (comparatively) and has never been the touching type. Stands to reason he had no real experience.

"So," Naruto says, in a slow hurt voice that means he's trying, really trying to understand and come to terms even though he isn't sure he wants to. "Where does that leave the present situation? I mean, I mean," and he blushes, but doesn't avert his eyes, "Jiraiya was convinced they are… you know."

Sakura closes her eyes for a moment but opens them again, looks into Naruto's to say, "If Kakashi wants to sleep with him, and I think we've established he does, then I figure Sasuke is probably going to let him."

"But _why_?" Naruto cries. "After – that – he can't want it! Can he?"

She rubs forming wrinkles off her forehead. Speaks in the voice of a teacher worn down by long years of work. "You regard sex as something intimate and loving, right? Yeah, so do I. But do you honestly imagine Sasuke can, after three years with Orochimaru?"

She hopes to heaven Naruto has figured out or been told about that part at least, because otherwise there will be hell to pay, but it seems he has because his expression is more thoughtful than enraged. Still a bit on the traumatized side, though.

"Then, are you – do you – are you saying he doesn't care, so he might as well sleep with anyone who asks?"

"I think he would rather kill than sleep with most of the world's inhabitants. When he isn't ready for the first option, though, then yes, I believe he would likely agree to the second."

"Oh," Naruto says, rather blankly. "I see. Alright. I think I… need to think about this a bit more."

He pauses in the doorway, turns partway back to look at her with the first inscrutable expression she's ever seen on him.

"Sasuke's convinced you distrust him," he says. "He claims you'd be scared of being alone with him and that you tried to put a restrainer jutsu on him on Tsunade's behalf. Is it true?"

Naruto is probably the only person she has ever met who doesn't lie, ever, not even to himself. That means things, some of which she has yet to figure out.

"Yes," she says. "For the most part it is: I did attempt to restrain him, and I was very wary, because he was so plainly unstable. But he's been – better. I mean," and perhaps she is trying to convince herself, just a little, "he realized himself he'd gone too far after summoning Orochimaru from the dead, and he took the consequences. And before that, he arranged himself to live with someone Tsunade trusts. So I think that now, I might – might trust him. When it comes to me. But he can't be trusted around people he doesn't care for, you know that, Naruto!"

"You think he's living with me to win _Tsunade's_ trust?" Naruto asks, and his voice is so twisted and so bitter and so much like lashing out. "You think _that_'s all there is to it?" And he is begging, now (he's begging me).

"No," she says. "Not only. But, Naruto, and it's not his fault, but – but I don't think he's capable of loving anyone, not like we mean it."

She shouts the last words at his back, because he's running.

xxxxx

The forest is a blur around him, and the thinks it should be calming but it's not (and kyuubi is a rising tide within him, painting the greenness in shades of red).

He doesn't have the energy to spare, right now, to fight back.

Realizes, after some time, that while he's never been adept at locating chakra signals he still knows which direction to head.

Ask Sasuke?

Yeah, it's probably time I did.

The woods blur now not because his eyesight is fracturing between blue and red but because he's going so fast (it's the smell, he realizes). He can smell Sasuke, however diluted with sea-water and dirt the scent may currently be.

He doesn't stop, when the sound of Sasuke's blood pumping becomes the only relevant scale by which to measure time, when he catches sight of a black-and-white figure reclining against the outer wall of a shabby building. He does slow down a little, though.

"Naruto." He can see Sasuke's eyes are closed, a nonchalant hand holding a nicked cigarette to his mouth. "What happened to the Kyuubi seal?"

"Sasuke." Sasuke opens his eyes, now Naruto is crowding him, soaking up the warmth. Smell of Sasuke, and the water and dirt, and of bad food and chalky makeup, ashes and sweat, Kakashi and sex. His face is swollen and bruised. "What am I – am I just some goodwill charade? What the hell have you been doing with him?"

He tried trusting Sasuke absolutely once. See where that left him, with a broken promise and a broken heart (more fury and grief and cheated hope than he can stand, anymore).

(more love than i can stomach, if it's been betrayed, and more hatred)

And Sasuke is the first person he's had, really had, and I can't let go.

"What business is that of yours?" Sasuke snaps back, sleep-softened face contorting into upset lines. "Maybe I had to break some of your illusions. If you only cared about your own stupid fantasy version of me, I'm glad I did!"

Hell, he thinks distinctly a few moments later. I was an idiot to trust him.

An idiot to put a sleeping jutsu on Kakashi because he wanted some privacy, an idiot to needle Naruto though he felt the seal weakened, an idiot to stand there without defense of any kind.

An idiot to let Naruto punch him clear through the wall.

God. Did I honestly think Naruto would not hurt me for real?

Shows what he knows.

Knuckles explode into his face, splinters cascading around him as he crashes through the thick wooden wall, and he rolls on the floor inside until a table leg stops him.

Naruto stares after him – why the hell didn't you dodge?

Then Sasuke's pushing himself up on a shaky elbow, ears ringing with the impact from the blow (cursing his own sealed chakra, the pregnancy that forces him to direct mostly all his energy to protection of his abdomen) and Naruto's eyes are redder than his own.

Fuck – seems Sasuke isn't the only possessive part of the relationship.

Broken illusions, broken promises, they make you sharp. Hard.

Sasuke isn't, here and now, not like that.

Which, unfortunately, means he's down again almost as fast as he's up.

On the grass this time, his shoulders digging into the earth underneath as Naruto forces, pushes and holds him down.

Sasuke has too little chakra, has too devote too much of what he has to protect the child – was too naïve, was hit too hard, is too concerned not killing Naruto. Doesn't have time to use the Mangekyou burning his eyes.

Doesn't stand a chance.

He wonders how much of this Naruto realizes.

(wonders whether it matters)

xxxxx

Hmm, Sasuke is down, well and truly, curled on the ground under him: has gone from using his arms to fight back to employing them to shield his face.

That won't do.

_Look at me, you asshole!_

Killing fury roaring in his ears, he forces Sasuke's arms away, snapping them so they won't hide the face again, so they can only lie on the ground twisted in the wrong direction.

(that's better)

He grabs the pointed chin, dark with abrasions, forces Sasuke's head up. He tastes mostly of blood, now, that expensive brand of Uchiha blood, coughs what feels like galleons of it into Naruto's mouth.

Naruto bites a bit, all the same.

Needs to possess, in all the ways he possibly can, own completely, take it if it won't be given, mark up, and Sasuke, seen through that red haze, is not fighting back anymore.

xxxxx

Later Sasuke is brought back from the red darkness waiting between the tears in reality, that numb nothingness he has not had reason to enter for some time, by a pulse of vermilion chakra rising into him.

He screams then, for what he is reasonably convinced is the first time (but then why is his throat so sore?).

The good thing (and it's really bad that this has to be the good thing but it is) is that the invading demon god chakra effectively breaks asunder Sasuke's seal.

It's smooth as instinct, now, what he has to do: Orochimaru's knowledge is absolutely immediate again, and he has more chakra to dispose of than he could reasonably need.

Naruto's left hand is clawing at his throat, leaving him lightheaded with lack of air and distantly glad the idiot didn't simply snap his neck, while Naruto's other hands is scratching at something inside his chest.

"Tsukiyomi, asshole," Sasuke gasps, and with a frozen look of infinite surprise Naruto collapses over him.

Sasuke stares over his shoulder into the sky and thinks about doing almost exactly this with Itachi.

The limp weight atop him, stuck to him by blood, the Mangekyou Sharing tinting the sky reddish.

(the funny thing is, he doesn't feel anything at all)

xxxxx

Jiraiya isn't prone to regrets. Fucking worthless waste of time, regretting. Better to accept and move on, do something about it.

He is, however, prone to worrying. Hard to avoid, what with life being what it is, filled with responsibilities and mistakes and fucking Murphy and his stupid law somewhere in the fundamental structure of the world.

Doing what he did to Naruto was inevitable, so he isn't regretting, but he's worrying. About telling Tsunade about it, mostly. That's why he's here, sitting in the back of a tea house and drinking something a fair bit stronger than tea.

Half a flask later he feels it, what he's been fearing and keeping his senses out for: an explosion of charka that isn't really Naruto's.

With the summoning jutsu almost executed he spots Shizune on the street outside, snags her.

"Jiraiya-sama! What..?" Bewildered, annoyed, anxious.

(i wouldn't dream of questioning any of those emotions, girl)

"We might need a healer," he says. "But first of all, we need speed."

Thank god they are on the outskirts of the village, or Gamabunta wouldn't fit. He crushes several abandoned buildings under his weight as it is, actually.

"Run," Jiraiya tells the frog king brusquely, jumping astride the mighty creature, brining Shizune along with an arm around her middle. "To Kyuubi."

Shizune would not have been Tsunade's assistant for years if she did not recognize the absolutely wrong time for questions, so stands quiet and pale beside him, fingers forming nervous seals with no power behind them.

When they are halfway there the Nine Tails' chakra abruptly fizzles out. Something else flares in its stead for a moment, something gross with the power of blood sacrifice, but only for a moment.

"Fucking Uchiha," he mutters, mostly from habit.

"You don't think they – they couldn't have killed each other, could they?"

"Naruto's alive," Gamabunta says, can feel it like all summoned creatures are aware of their summoners.

"Good," Shizune breathes. Naruto's alive, and Sasuke must reasonably be too, to have subdued Kyuubi.

Only, when they do arrive, neither boy looks particularly vivid.

Jiraiya is there first, carefully lifts Naruto's slumped shape away from the smaller body that, shockingly, _isn't_ straining painfully to get free from under the blond's weight.

Good thing he brought Shizune along: he can't just see skin and flesh, of Sasuke, he can see bone in some of the holes, splintered bone. Smells torn flesh and boiled flesh.

Then Shizune is there, pushing him away and bending over Sasuke, aglow with the mild green light of healing chakra.

"Where's Kakashi?" Jiraiya demands, standing uselessly on the sidelines with Naruto limp and too light in his arms, eyeing the considerable number of civilians spying on them from inside the nearby inn. Clearly too scared to be of any help, the lot of them.

"Inside," Sasuke wheezes, face still so nonplussed Jiraiya has to admit to being surprised the boy's coherent enough to answer (his teeth are white pinpricks in the thick crimson smearing his mouth, greasing the words' way out). "Sleeping."

"Leave Naruto here, Jiraiya," Shizune instructs without turning from where she's busily doing something to Sasuke's mostly ruined chest. "It's better not to move him so much, I think."

As far as Jiraiya's ever understood it makes no difference whatsoever what happens in the real world to someone under the damnable Mangekyou curse, but he might as well, sentimental and reluctant though he might be to gently ease Naruto back down on the grass.

The civilians shrink back from him as he hurries inside, up the stairs to where guest rooms are normally located. This close, concentrating on it, he can feel Kakashi's muted chakra signature. Fuck only knows how the man can be asleep after the tumult outside, but it seems Sasuke wasn't lying.

Pushing the ratty door open, lock and all, he discovers the younger man splayed out over the narrow bed, a dirty sheet covering most of what appears to be an otherwise naked body.

"Oh Jesus," Jiraiya mutters in disgust, performing the simple move necessary to release Kakashi from the sleeping jutsu placed upon him.

At least he wakes up impressively fast, Jiraiya has to give him that.

Well, at least he does after Jiraiya's grown tired of waiting and yells at him to get the hell up.

"Hmm?" Kakashi replies, reflexively catching the bundle of clothes Jiraiya throws at him. "Jiraiya-sama? What?"

"Your team's in shambles outside," Jiraiya tells him curtly.

(funny, isn't it, that a team so pampered as the seventh, graced with genius after famed genius for their teacher, has yet to score an instructor able to protect them from utter disaster)

Kakashi is dressed and out the door before Jiraiya has fully explained; he hurries after, continuing about how it was a risk but a necessary one to unlock more of the Kyuubi seal, and apparently Naruto was upset, and he and Sasuke appear to have been fighting, seems it ended with Sasuke hitting Naruto with a Tsukiyomi.

"Oh, and," he adds, slower, reaches out to touch the other's arm in sympathy before Kakashi looks neutral fury at him and he lets the hand drop. "Be prepared it's not a pretty sight. Sasuke, he's… worse off than Naruto was after Valley at the End."

And Kakashi is running, stumbling, the world angling the wrong way (this is what falling is like).

The same sickening twist, falling in love and falling from grace, and nothing else can matter and you're desperate.

It is very bright outside, the early afternoon sun glaring unforgivingly. There is Sasuke, clearly uncomfortable on his back, limbs spread around him and pointing in all the wrong directions, practically nude since Shizune has kept stripping away already ruined clothes to get at the wounds. Kakashi can smell the thick oozing blood and burned flesh from several meters' distance, but is kneeling at Sasuke's side before he has quite absorbed this. The world is tilting the wrong way.

Eyes closed in a face even whiter than it was the day Itachi died, so smeared with redness it looks ridiculously like he's been crying blood, the Sharingan color bleeding over his features.

Kakashi discovers he is reaching out for him, fingertips shivering close to the dirty curve of Sasuke's lax face, when Shizune says without looking up, "Don't touch him! Multiple head trauma, and at least one Rasengan through the torso."

I could curse, Kakashi thinks. He's never been wont to cursing, but this might be as good a time as any to start.

Shizune says, "I need to concentrate."

xxxxx

Sakura is admitted into her teammates' hospital rooms on the third day, when the visitor-ban is lifted at last.

No unusually, she reflects with her hand numb on the door-handle, the Team Seven prodigies have caused a nigh unprecedented ruckus.

Not unusually, I have had no part in it.

She wonders what's worst – to get hurt or to watch your loved ones in pain you can't touch because somehow you can never reach them, not in time, never be quite on their level.

She shakes her head. I am no longer a child, such selfishness is unbecoming.

Especially when it is as clear to her as to the rest of the village that Jiraiya-sama did something to Naruto that made Kakashi thank the Sannin to stay the fuck away from his team, I don't need your help failing them.

Also that it appears whatever was done to Naruto was done largely with the intention of producing a means by which to stop Sasuke, should he ever prove this necessary by snapping irrevocably.

Sakura admits that this line of reasoning is not without justification.

However, she cannot see the methods employed due to it as such, not when Naruto was returned without a scratch but with his mind locked inside itself by the Tsukiyomi (more a curse than a jutsu). Not when she did not even recognize Sasuke as they brought him into the hospital, as torn up as she's ever seen anyone.

Standing in the hallway the emergency crew rushed him through, she could _see_ his heart under the green haze of Shizune-senpai's soothing chakra.

The most popular conclusion drawn, grim and grimy or not, is the fatally ironical one that Sasuke's saved the village.

Sakura, of course, harbors no such fond illusions.

What she cannot understand is how Naruto could ever conceivably be perceived as anything that anyone would require rescuing from. Then again he has been shunned almost for as long as he has lived, and she is starting to suspect, belatedly but never mind, that there might be deeper and darker reasons for this than it has previously occurred to her to imagine.

Also there is the matter of how she can't see a reason for Kakashi, Jiraiya-sama and Shizune-senpai to lie about who beat Sasuke up.

This knowledge makes it no easier for her to perceive Naruto as capable of doing it, physically or emotionally, but there you have it. Life's a mystery, and if against all odds you manage to get to the bottom of it you'll probably drown down there.

She opens and closes the door behind her before she can hesitate on the threshold: knows he hates that and figures that this once she has objectively good reason to indulge his quirks.

"Sasuke," she says, hollow.

He's supposed to be alright, and indeed is evidently quite capable of turning his head to face her, but she swallows thickly all the same. Sasuke the spoiled prodigy has never been half so battered before, features discolored and swollen out of proportion between the bandages: healing requires a minimum of charka from the patient, which means there are limits to how much you can do without letting the injured one recuperate between sessions. Anything that didn't pose a direct threat to his life has plainly been left unattended.

Supposed to be alright, she repeats quietly to herself. Right. As if anyone could be anything even approaching alright after being abused to within an inch of their life by their best friend.

On the other hand, she reminds herself harshly, it is not as though Sasuke has not been through these motions before, from the other side of the looking glass.

She shakes her head.

The unborn child is fine, as unhurt as Naruto's impossibly unscratched body, though she remains doubtful whether that's truly a good thing.

Sasuke's eyes are red and he looks mostly like an insomniac panda.

Doesn't reply beyond a listless glance that sweeps over her and then back into nothingness.

"Sasuke," she repeats, uncertain and angry, voice lowered in a muted kind of urgency. Strides fast through the room and seats herself gingerly on the generous bedside.

"Sakura," he replies dutifully, and she's never actually heard him pull of a perfectly inflectionless tone before, though gods know he's practiced endlessly.

"I… brought you some food." She fiddles with the yellow wrapping, eventually lifts her gaze from her hands and places the gift on the nearby table. "How are you feeling? I mean, I know it's bad, but… aside from the whole like shit bit."

Sasuke gives her a long stare equal parts bland and level. Eventually he says, "I don't."

"What?" She can't quite decide whether she's annoyed or terribly anxious.

"I'm not." Pause, because she suspects it is very plain she is not comprehending. "Feeling."

(and he isn't)

Hasn't felt a thing since Naruto was made to collapse over him with a curse in his red eyes.

Perhaps he has been reduced to Orochimaru's sole two moods of spiteful and bored. Certainly nothing else has been in him since what happened outside the inn.

Minding the strange abstractedness would involve a degree of caring he is no longer capable of, in this non-reality, over which the red shadows spill so thickly.

In fact I might have welcomed it, had I had the energy for that.

This is the emptiness of spirit he has been going in and out of for years, invading and acutely present at last. Everything is distant, and untouchable, and peaceful, and nothing matters very much and the discontent is comfortable in its way, like the buzz of overworked chakra in his head.

Sakura stares at him and he notes with that new bleak incuriosity that her eyes are wide underneath furrowed brows, her mouth opening to speak.

"Sasuke," a voice indeed says, but it isn't hers.

Sasuke looks Kakashi over dispassionately, this man he has hated and feared and loved, and he doesn't feel a thing.

Shaky fingers touch his face, which hurts a bit (it's just that physical sensation alone is meaningless, and he's lost the ability to translate it into anything that isn't).

I'm not trying anymore, not for anything.

It's the first time in his life he's given up absolutely, so he's bloody well earned it.

He can't find anything left to struggle for or against, and probably this is just as well.

Kakashi touches his face, and Sasuke thinks he might have felt comforted or resentful, before, when it was different. Now he doesn't, and really, that's all that matters.

He's glad in a rather horribly hollow way.

"Hello," he says. Silence grows weary after a while, and it's the polite thing to do.

"What the hell went wrong?" Kakashi asks, sounding a little hoarse. "I wake from a sleeping jutsu to Jiraiya howling about you and Naruto killing each other outside. Seems I missed some time."

"I told Tsunade," Sasuke replies evenly after some length of time. "I made a miscalculation. It got me beat up and it got Naruto a Tsukiyomi he might otherwise have received sooner."

"But why?" Sakura erupts helplessly. "Why would he ever try to hurt you?"

Sasuke sighs and quirks an eyebrow. The conversation is getting tiresome. Lying takes too much effort, though. It's dangerous, in the red shadows that always twist your thoughts.

"Among other things he had the impression I'd been cheating on him."

"And you didn't correct this misapprehension because…?"

He considers. "Maybe I was tired of lying."

"Jesus Christ," Sakura groans. "Never mind. Get better, alright? I'm going to go see Naruto."

Kakashi stays.

Sasuke doesn't honestly care one way or the other and falls asleep.

(when he wakes up in the dim darkness shikamaru is standing in the shadows.

"i could kill you now."

"so i reckon," sasuke replies, and goes back to sleep curled painfully on his side)

xxxxxxxxxx


	20. Noli Me Tangere

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 20:**

"**Noli Me Tangere"**

Naruto, who doesn't otherwise, is snoring under the impediment of the Tsukiyomi, little snorts of distress escaping from between his lax lips.

Far be it from Naruto to suffer limp and silent under a Bloodline curse that legend claims has laid waste to kingdoms and quelled demon gods: he's huffing, twisting, face scrunched up in discontentment.

Kakashi lets Sakura mind him, staring blankly out the window, not because he sees anything through it or indeed because he is interested in the offered view but because he feels it would not be wise to look at Naruto right now.

Perhaps not ever.

Not this particular failure, which he might never be able to remedy. Much less forgive (himself).

"What are you making him see?" he asked Sasuke yesterday.

Almost the last thing he said before he could stand it no longer, fled.

The manufactured grin was horrible and lopsided and Kakashi wanted to kiss it and never to see it again. Apart from the mouth, its expression quite obviously shaped by conscious will rather than any spontaneous emotion, Sasuke looked quite thoughtful.

"I've no idea," he eventually admitted, licking at a cut on his lip and grimacing at the sour taste of stale blood.

It had been instinct, the Tsukiyomi, no thought, not a proper attack. Sasuke had had no plan at all for what he wanted the recipient to live through (die through).

The result, as far as anyone has been able to reasonably conjecture, is that the cursed jutsu wove its wave into its victim's mind, brought alive his own worst fear, the one scenario he knows must surely destroy him.

Kakashi is rather grimly satisfied they've placed every conceivable seal on Naruto/Kyuubi. Steeled for the distasteful task he painted and activated a long row of intricate designs, fitted them into the ink haphazardness of spells mastered by other hands than his. Naruto's body was paler than it should have been, covered in thin sweat that made the color run.

"You haven't been visiting him, have you?" Sakura asks quietly from the bedside (she might as well have been naruto's wife, fiddling and fussing with the coverlet and looking heartbreak at the dead face).

"I've been through the Tsukiyomi myself," he says with weary gentleness, because this is Sakura and he won't break another kind worthless girl with his selfish lies and stupid honesty. "He is so far from reality nothing in it can affect him."

"I know it's not like a regular coma," she says, wincing. "I've been stopping by all the same. I like to think… that even little things can matter."

She's been in Naruto's room, he's been in the liquor. Neither of them has seen Sasuke.

(i don't. feel, i mean. i don't feel, at all)

"Ready?" Tsunade asks from the doorway, and Kakashi nods, a slow, jerky movement. A puppet's movement.

Sakura's acquiesce is sincere and solemn.

"Step back from the bed," Tsunade orders her. "Kakashi, hold him down, just in case."

He nods again, smoother now, placing heavy confident hands on Naruto's rapidly thinning shoulders. Had to accept the role as Naruto's temporary guardian, because Jiraiya is still and empathically persona non grata, and letting it be Iruka would mean two useless people in the room. He rather thinks Tsunade allotted Sakura the spot as next of kin because she's easier to order out of harm's way.

Too bad harm's is not exactly a narrow path.

"Here we go," Tsunade mutters, placing a sweaty palm on Naruto's forehead.

Not replying, Kakashi perceives the immensely delicate work of chakra inside the demon child's mind, watches Tsunade's face surrender to weary, aggressive lines over the next two hours of struggle.

Sealed, unsealed and re-sealed, hit by a Tsukiyomi that makes those Itachi dealt out look like childish tricks. Probably Kyuubi took the brunt of that, though, so Naruto's mind should be reasonably intact.

When eventually his eyes slam open they glare red for a moment before succumbing to dazed, fractured blueness.

"Sasuke," he croaks, and he is begging and cursing the name, through the name. "I didn't! Where is! It's not true! _I didn't mean to kill you!_ I'm _sorry_, you asshole, I hate you, you have to live, you have to!"

Physically it isn't hard to hold him down, but the seals are vanishing one after the other, sucked through the skin and rendered meaningless by the force of Naruto's hysterical grief, the wild pain owning him up.

Tsunade can't reach him, that's plain enough, and Kakashi has his hands full restraining the uncoordinated flailing.

Well, they're hardly taking him to the real Sasuke, and they need him to calm down, and at least genjutsu has always come easily to Sakura. That at least she can do, and well.

"Henge no Jutsu," she says, hidden less by Kakashi's frame than by Naruto's utter disinterest in everything that isn't Sasuke.

Which means he is staring at her, with all the focus of a possessed lunatic and that frightening capacity for love he has, owning her up with his eyes the moment her transformation is completed.

She swallows. Okay, right, so she looks like Sasuke. That part is fine, her mastery of the genjutsu such that she needs not doubt she is currently the living image of the Uchiha, conjured now with a line of thick bruises blossoming up his throat to account for her skill as a voice actress being considerably lesser.

Unfortunately she does not have the arrogance to be as naturally confident in this body as Sasuke appears to be.

She fidgets, snaps out of it with a sharp inward curse, approaches the bed because it's the only sound course of action and probably Sasuke wouldn't be scared stiff of doing so.

With a blank face hinting that he considers this less than wise Kakashi releases Naruto when she is within reaching distance, and the blond throws himself at her recklessly, too immediately for clumsiness to have time to impair the movement. "Sasuke," he breathes, mouth open and vulnerable as the starkly shaking fingers rising to trace her face with the strangest gentleness, affirming the reality of her presence (restrained violence is in his every ardent movement).

"Shh," she says, aching to hush him soothingly but managing to turn it into more of a condescending frown. "It was only a nightmare."

She can't help freezing up rigidly the next moment, when Naruto is kissing her. His mouth is over hers brutal and wet, and she screams into it in startled pain because the accompanying embrace is _hard_. They hardly need to fight, if this is how he and Sasuke touch in affection.

She forces herself to kiss him back, softly, just a little bit, so he won't realize it's all fake. Given how shattered he is he's likely to believe most anything placed in front of his eyes, but it never hurts to be careful.

"What did you see?" she asks kindly when she's managed to disentangle a bit and push him back down to sit on the bed. This move, which seemed clever at first, is perhaps not so much so, because she's fairly certain she gets more bruises from how he refuses to let go, practically dragging her into his lap and resting his face in the curve of her neck, clinging to her like a desperately possessive child.

She wonders if Sasuke would allow this, were he actually here.

"It was – The Valley at the End," he whispers, voice thick and unsteady. "I killed you." He clings. "Over and over and _over_ again."

This is where she imagines Sasuke would huff in insult and sneer, "Like you'd ever manage _that_, dead-last."

This is where she strokes his back comfortingly, resting her borrowed face against the crown of his head. "It's alright. We're both fine. It was just a genjutsu. Now, I need you to sleep, alright? Good."

It's an unkind but unavoidable thought that it's fortunate Naruto is so shockingly out of it or he'd have been bound to notice the person he continues to cling to as he obediently slumps back into unconsciousness most definitely isn't Uchiha Sasuke.

Less fortunate is that stubborn holding on, how he practically squeaks in distress when she so much as moves a muscle. She had not counted on being stuck crushed into a sleeping Naruto's side for what will probably be excruciatingly long hours.

Or perhaps she has no time to be concerned about that at all, because Kakashi is looking past her at the doorway, and Tsunade-sama is turning as well, and there is Sasuke.

"Impressive performance," he says scathingly where he stands leaning against the wall, not nonchalantly but more like he would fall without its support, looking shaky and determined.

And yes, that pissed, fragile impassivity of expression is what she tried and failed to impersonate.

"May I inquire as to what brought about this dazzling act?"

He doesn't look at Naruto at all – looks at Kakashi, at Sakura, but it is as though his gaze blanks over Naruto.

"When did you get here?" Tsunade-sama asks, and Sakura is startled badly by the implicit admission the Hokage was too caught up in her work to notice his arrival.

"Right before he woke up. Why?"

"Because then it should be obvious it was essential for his sake as well as ours that he be calmed down quickly, and plainly you were needed for that – a nice, reassuring you. Clearly it would have been less than wise to appeal to the real thing."

"Tsunade-sama!" Sakura protests, feeling Naruto's arm tighten around her waist and Naruto's face pressing closer into her neck while Sasuke nods thoughtfully.

"Anyway," the Hokage continues. "I have other business to see to. I promised Jiraiya leave to stop by before he went on his next mission, so be prepared he'll show."

She and Sasuke keep eye-contact warily, like you do with a snake or a wolf, until she is well out of the room, closing the door behind her, and Sakura's focus resettles on her prodigy teammate.

He looks better today, with most of the injuries healed, but the process must have left him frightfully weak for him to allow his lack of strength to shine through in front of them. Or perhaps he simply does not care, is still stuck in the gray meaninglessness that drove her and Kakashi away.

(except then there'd be no reason for him to have limped across the hospital to naruto's room the day and time he knew they were going to release the tsukiyomi)

He slouches forward slowly, movement hazy and carrying an edge of tightly leashed pain, moving towards the bed, the one stabile thing to cling to in the room.

Kakashi catches him a scant few meters from the edge of it, having found some sign she must have missed to indicate Sasuke won't disembowel him for it.

He must have been about to fall, then.

Otherwise she reckons he'd splutter, instead of hanging reassured in Kakashi's arms, face buried in the man's chest and hands coming up to clutch unsteadily at Kakashi's shirt. Of course, she reflects, Sasuke wouldn't be comfortable without being in charge of the holding on.

At what feels like long length he stirs minimally and Kakashi gathers him up, turns to deposit him on the edge of the bed.

"Kakashi!" someone bellows from outside then, a scratchy male voice. "Emergency! Team Anko team needs aid immediately!"

"We'll be alright," Sasuke says lightly, amused but undeniably kind. "I promise."

_(he's come here to kill naruto)_

The certainty is so immediate and instinctive Sakura cannot voice it for the life of her (nor apparently for the life or naruto).

Kakashi's smile is hurried and young after all as he presses a brief touch to Sasuke's temple.

"Later, then."

And so it is only the two of them (because in his current state naruto does not count as present, never mind how ardently he crushes her against him).

"Where you planning to remain in bed with him?" Sasuke asks a last, flicking blue-black hair out of a face still grayish and a tad swollen but back in possession of scornfully contrite expressions.

"I don't exactly have much of a choice, do I?" Sakura replies irritably – a credible impersonation, she thinks and smiles thinly at the irony, of Sasuke's normal tones. "Christ, is this how you two usually touch each other? I feel bruised all over."

Sasuke sighs the sigh of someone who has found his life overrun by thick, immovable stupidity and gets to his feet again. Steady, the few steps necessary, he makes his way to the head end of the bed and presses a few fast seals to Naruto's face. She can see the discontent, the furious humiliation and disgusted fear on his face, can practically read his thought as he reclaims his hand as though from a burn.

(_i still can't do it_)

Immediately the bluish energy has been absorbed into him, the blond's grip slackens, his weight collapsing limply over her.

Looking like he'd quite like to shake his head, only he has seen so much dumbness by now that it hardly merits a reaction anymore, Sasuke removes Naruto's arm from around her middle and pushes Naruto over onto his back, effectively freeing her. His hands on Naruto are fast, impersonal; haunted, she thinks.

Drawing a deep, liberated breath, she sits up, releasing the Henge and smoothing her clothes.

Sasuke has gone to stand at the window, his turned back brittle in the hospital clothes. His posture is that of thoughtfulness, his hands resting on the glass, probably for support.

She is reaching for something to say when the door slams open, heralding the announced advent of Jiraiya-sama.

He looks uncharacteristically uncertain, face lined with worry and wounds. Nothing serious, but scratches that imply quite clearly Tsunade lost her temper, that he did not concentrate as well as one might have hoped on mission.

Sasuke glances at him over his shoulder once, gaze fleeting cold and liquid over the Sannin.

"Still out of it, huh?" Jiraiya-sama mumbles, stepping up beside Naruto's sleeping face, touching a thick, sun-burned fingertip to a whiskered cheek.

(sasuke tenses but doesn't move)

"Yes," Sakura says, only to immediately bite her tongue in acute embarrassment because it is and should from the beginning have been apparent that he was not talking to her.

"I heard," Jiraiya-sama says to Sasuke without looking at him, "you stopped him to save the village."

It's the utterance thickest with contradictionary implications she has ever heard him make, maybe that she's ever heard anyone make.

(there is the protest: i can't believe that. i don't want to believe that)

(the admittance: it was…good of you. i'm grateful you handled my mistake)

"For the village? Whatever brought about that particular distasteful delusion?" His voice is thick with venom.

Jiraiya-sama snorts, shakes his head in what doesn't quite look like disgust.

"Thought as much," he says and pats Naruto roughly on the head. "Tell him to take care, eh?"

"Of course," Sakura replies, because someone should.

He lingers barely five seconds after that, the Sannin. Leaves, she assumes, with the knowledge that it is possible after all to retrieve your lost ones, so long as they are loved. And that, and her heart clenches for him, he failed.

"You don't have to stay," Sasuke says after some time.

"Of course I do," she replies, puzzled. "We're Team Seven, we–"

"Team Seven?" he snorts, scornful. But at least he turns from the window, stands looking straight at the bed with her and Naruto, his lower back resting against the wall. "We're just four people fumbling around hurting each other."

"Did it hurt you?" she inquires. "What I did with Naruto? As you, I mean."

With the sunlight falling in from behind him his face is rendered a white blur, but from what little she can see his expression is honestly incredulous.

"Why should it? I'd made sure myself he wasn't clear on reality, though certainly it was a stretch to believe you to be me after that miserable attempt at making out."

And she is grateful he doesn't say what he must have thought (why the hell should i care about you kissing him when he loves me and almost killed me?).

"Really?" she says, coy, because yes, you'd expect Naruto of all people to be absolutely certain about who is and isn't Sasuke, but there was the matter of the Tsukiyomi (because i can't stand to touch upon what i am so thankful he did not say). "How _does_ Uchiha Sasuke kiss, then?"

"You're serious," he realizes after a molasses-slow moment, sounding a bit like the world's proved him right: people are crazy. Shakes his head with a swift mirthless movement. "Guess I might as well. As you wish, then."

And she asked because it's nice to be able to tease him, reaffirm he's alive and safe and in possession of some kind of humor, and because the sight of Naruto broken and Sasuke torn apart made it abundantly, petrifying clear that she does love them, fears them less than she fears for them, and so she must sound things out to find her place in what remains of Team Seven. She needs to understand, and said what she did, and it never crossed her mind Sasuke might do anything more than snort at her.

But she should have remembered this isn't Sasuke anymore, not exactly, for he has moved fast and is leaning across the bed, the fingers of one hand treaded firmly through her hair, angling her face.

The kiss she dreamed about for years was smooth and romantic, however she knew the Sasuke that existed then would have been awkward, clumsy with concentration.

(naruto's mouth on hers was a shock)

This, Sasuke touching her with a kind of professionalism, is filthy and sexual and a throbbing thrumming thrill of a turn-on to be needed.

Ino and Lee, she knows, each want her very much. There is a stark difference between that and need. Between, she suspects, what is Team Seven and what isn't. They're so twisted, the bonds between us, tying us together all the more closely because of it.

"Oh hell," Sasuke says, with something like horror, the first syllable pressed to her lips, the second minutely further away as he stands back a little ways. "It's so obvious – Orochimaru never cared what he fucked. I could have just sleep with a girl, after we merged."

And wait. Isn't that an implicit way of admitting she isn't the only one affected after all?

"Sasuke," she says, and means a lot of things. What is going on?

She cups his face in her hands and they are still very close, and softness creeps over her expression at how caught and miserable he looks.

"Sasuke," she tries, and if it weren't for how fast her heart is beating she'd say she's waxing maternal.

"Don't," he protests, but is forced never the less to sink down onto the bed when she tugs. So weak still, after three separate healing sessions and with bruises still left on him, and his face blanks over with humiliation, breeding rage. "Don't – tempt me!"

"Sasuke," she repeats, almost laughing now. "You were exclusively gay five minutes ago."

He shrugs free, pushing impotently at bangs falling forward into his face. It's dangerously hard to think of him as dangerous, right now.

"It isn't really that I want to sleep with you," he explains, chill and as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, as though this entire conversation were less than surreal. "It's that I am sorely tempted to make sure I own you, any way I can."

And suddenly it makes all the sense in the world, Sasuke sleeping with Kakashi and Naruto beating Sasuke senseless and Sasuke clutching Naruto's heart between his fingers in that valley, in the end

It is clear to me why I was kept away and why that was necessary and why it is no longer an option

"Come here," she mutters with affection so acute it turns her voice gruff. "This is how Haruno Sakura touches people."

Kakashi or Naruto he'd hit for attempting something like this, but for precisely the reason she can never be an equal he can't hurt her, so struggles only minutely as she arranges his weakened, bony body to lean back against hers.

Oh, hell. She doesn't matter, hence it doesn't matter if he's too tired to get away. If she wraps her arms around him and strokes calmly along his arms, except that fans the yearning again and that is very dangerous (mother was like this).

He reassures himself, justifies himself (i don't much trust her, she can't harm me any more than i let her, and i won't touch her, it's safe, it is) and her hands on his shoulders make things lighter, easier – a support pillar with no will of its own.

Orochimaru is restless again, crawling over the broken shards of the seal, and Sasuke is quite well aware of how the Sannin attracted people to him and how he broke them in.

A few promises, some touches and soft expressions, and it would be done. She'd be broken, and his, the pieces of her shattered and he there to collect them, keep the ones he wants for himself.

She's so easy. So safe. So mundane.

A world and more away from the creature that pushed a hand clear through his chest, grabbed his spine, shook him from the inside out until he was fractured, spilling out, a chaotic swirl of breaking things that could no longer be kept or contained.

And before that happened he'd have said Sakura was boring, that he could hardly be bothered with someone who could never challenge him.

_Funny how things work out, isn't it, Sasuke-kun?_

_That she might yet turn out to be the single one of you not in pieces._

The silence is broken at length by Sakura's pager going off.

She is tempted to turn it off, but it must be Anko's team being brought in, and provided whatever incident they were involved in was sufficiently severe that Kakashi was called in seemingly as fast as he was found, she had really better go help.

She is surprised and relived to note Sasuke limping out of the room along with her (thought she'd have to abandon the struggle to keep him from being alone with naruto during present circumstances).

Considerably less reliving is the sight of the victims. Whoever they fought against was vicious and effective, and given how close the battle must have been waged for Kakashi to be fetched the way he was, Sakura is forced to execute a good deal of hard-won discipline to keep herself from shaking.

"Look," someone says impatiently behind her in a sharp, gritty voice – a tone she never imagined she'd hear from Shizune-senpai, and so she turns, shocked to find Sasuke propped against the doorway. "You can't be here."

"She's dying," he says, and it isn't Shizune-senpai his eyes (red now) are fixed upon.

Sakura looks fearfully to her left, follows his gaze to Anko. The Jounin kunoichi is bathing in her own blood – an expression Sakura has heard probably a million times but never grasped the meaning of, not until this moment. Gary gore lines the blurred figure, as though she had indeed stepped into a shower of blood and not dried herself off.

"Yes," Shizune-senpai says, fast and precise with pain. "After all the trouble with you and Naruto the healers of high enough level to deal with this have been left with too little chakra to manage it. We'd have to draw on her own resources, and they are obviously insufficient for the necessary procedure. I'm sorry."

Sasuke makes a thoughtful noise, gaze switching between Sakura and Anko.

"Well," he says at last. "I've always liked having her around."

"What're – Stop!"

Shizune-senpai isn't fast enough, and perhaps that's lucky.

Sasuke's chakra does something, like flicking a switch, his arm reaching towards Anko, fingers moving in useless imitation of the mental work.

The curse seal, sealed over again and again, all but forgotten on Anko's neck, bursts open.

Shizune-senpai bites her lip on angry remarks and bends to heal her.

When Anko wakes, a day later, she is lying on her back in a soft white bed with her hair let down, curling over her shoulders. She feels like a corpse, conjectures with wild dispassion that Orochimaru must have used the technique for summoning the dead. It is almost amusing he should go to such bothersome lengths, considering the fact he did not want her alive.

(i was thrown away. i chose to be rejected)

It is the fundament of her existence, so grounded it becomes inconsequential, hidden away, even from herself. There's just the hollowness left, and how she screams and trashes to fill it.

Opening her eyes, she finds the person with her isn't a Sannin, just a man, a Jounin like herself.

"Yo," Kakashi says mildly. "Feeling alive?"

"Provided the dead don't feel like shit, yeah," she mutters.

He smiles thinly, scars stark against still-pallid skin. "We can always hope. Sasuke says sorry."

At her raised eyebrow the grin deepens, and the lines around his eyes, and he adds unapologetically, "Well, he will after I'm done with him."

"Wasn't him," Anko says. The seal is sending waves of liquid static through her head. "God, name me someone who isn't broken."

"There might be a couple of them, I think," Kakashi says, with a warmer voice than she would have expected. She raises an eyebrow, again, and he a shoulder. "Shizune, Kurenai, Asuma, Iruka, Genma, Sakura, Konohamaru…"

"The pointless mediocrities, then." Because everything Orochimaru taught her wasn't false, much as she wishes it were within her to condemn him utterly.

(that there were anything at all within me.

oh stop, just stop that fucking childish whining)

"Mostly, yeah," he agrees without batting an eye. "Anyway, I was being mannerly and brought a gift. Icha Icha Paradise?" He liberates it from his back pocket and offers it to her.

"That's repulsive."

"Oh?"

"Don't. I like porn as much as the next person, just not that series." She gives him a wary look, but the floodgates of memory are being pushed open by the seal, and even what little trickles through is enough to break asunder any order she has managed to impose on her mind. Her grin is vicious, gleaming teeth and wilderness, a tame dog run off to the calling of the wolves. "Don't imagine Sasuke would, either."

(sitting in orochimaru's lap, being quite comfortable there, his chin balanced on the crown of her head, a heaviness of responsibility and privilege. of being selected. a white hand caressing her hair. my legs pale sticks, white skin on each side of his hips)

Leaf did not realize they rescued an empty vessel, something Orochimaru had poured his essence into and then taken it out of, away from.

He left tatters, taints, and her person is composed of his dirt and her own, mud puddle after mud puddle she splashes through, daring them to drown her and terrified they will, half wanting them to, and the icky gravel connecting them.

"It's not just him," she amends in a more mature tone. A faker tone, because she is not mature. How could she be? She never finished childhood. "I imagine everyone who knows any of the Sannin would find bits and pieces of them scattered over the pages."

"It's lucky I don't, then," Kakashi says, coming up to the bedside, bending and lifting hair from her neck. This time it's a grown woman he seals, as bitter and sexy and meanly twisted as himself.

Rin would have tried to be friendly; Obito would have stared at her mostly bare breasts.

(kakashi briefly wonders that he has never once before considered)

"Sasuke might be able to do it better," he says, but doesn't think.

Her hair is light and coarse under his fingers.

"Nah," she says. "You'll do."

xxxxxxxxxx


	21. Touché

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 21:**

"**Touché"**

This time Naruto wakes he thinks at first there is no one there. This disturbs him on many levels because he has the rather definite impression he made a glaring fool of himself in front of Tsunade and Kakashi about Sasuke, and went to bed with the smell of Sasuke's hair in his nose and the sleep-drool Sasuke hates drying on the Uchiha's neck.

On the other hand Naruto is quite depressingly well aware of the fact Sasuke is not considerate – wouldn't surprise him if the bastard had broken his arm to get free. He seems fine, though, all parts connected and flexible.

What the hell happened, then?

Because he has memories, but if they are valid Sasuke would not have touched him. This means he has no explanation at all regarding why he's lying tiredly in a hospital bed, or why a badly bruised and pretty damn faint Sasuke has apparently snuck out on him.

Which provides a pretty good incentive to open his eyes, actually. Instinct made him save that part, because light storming blinding into pupils long used to darkness is a horrible pain in the ass (frankly i'd _rather_ have some pain in the ass) and sight isn't half as imperative to him as to pure humans.

"Naruto."

A kind voice (a mild voice, a familiar voice). It makes disgust curl scratchy and scorching in his stomach.

"Kakashi-sensei." His voice is dry, mostly from how terribly dehydrated his throat seems to be. Blinking brightness-induced tears away he fixes his gaze on Kakashi (_sensei? no, i can't, anymore_), forcing uncooperative limbs to support him into a position vaguely reminiscent of sitting.

Kakashi looks him over calmly, evaluating vital stats, and Naruto hates how comforting the check-up is.

"I," he starts, because he has never had an inkling how to keep things in. "Look, um. Sakura-chan showed me something. A hospital file. I need you to tell me if it's true."

_Need you to tell me it's false_.

"Really?" comes a light, cold voice from the doorway.

Sakura-chan, but he barely notices her because the speaker's here, Sasuke's standing glaring on the doorstep.

_and I was bloody terrified of Kakashi, he beat us up and bargained with me, and I was scared he wouldn't agree and then I was even more scared when he did_

He doesn't look terrified.

He does look – wrong, though, it dawns on Naruto. There is nothing in his memory of waking from the Tsukiyomi that indicates there should be scabs in Sasuke's face or on his arms, neat scars crowning yellowing bruises that trace the shape of a strangling hand on his throat.

If Sasuke were the kind of person anyone could drag around, the firm grip Sakura-chan has around his wrist would suggest he's less than thrilled about being here.

As if the sullen expression wasn't enough of a clue-in.

Naruto's fingers twitch for contact (need to confirm the alright-ness, need to slap him around for getting himself hurt) around the (_oh please dreamed_) memory of Sasuke's insides breaking under them, spine snapping audibly apart between crushing digits.

"Naruto!" Sakura-chan exclaims. "You're awake! Er. Obviously." Her grin is broad and sheepish, a kind of determined happiness clinging to it.

"Yeah," he agrees, watching Sasuke shuffle to the bedside chair and sink down into it.

Reaching for him to inspect the inexplicable injuries is instinct, and he must have gotten used to having Sasuke close and kindly, because the world flashes white with denial when Sasuke pointedly evades him.

"What the hell happened?" Naruto grounds out. "You were here before and you weren't – like this. What are those wounds from? Sasuke!"

"That wasn't me," Sasuke says coldly.

"What are you on about? Then–"

…Then his eyes forward to his brain what they have flitted over, soft bruises on Sakura-chan. Bruises like what he'd expect on the person he hugged and clung to when he first woke.

"Oh," he says. And it's accusation and gratitude and a question when he adds: "It was you."

"Yes," she says. "Yes it was."

"What the hell file were you talking about earlier?" Sasuke interrupts. "It was no one's bloody business showing that to you."

Out of the corner of his eye he sees Kakashi reclining lazily at the window, once more engrossed in _Icha Icha Paradise_ and not sparing them any apparent attention.

"Sakura-chan," Naruto says with the kind of calm firmness he has never managed. She has no part in this: he doesn't need her to hear. "Go away."

Sasuke says nothing, but the way he and Naruto have eyes only for each other is apparently agreement enough, for she leaves almost at once.

"It was too my business," Naruto claims.

"Was not," Sasuke snaps. "Whatever happened between Kakashi and me is between Kakashi and me. It's no concern of yours."

"Is too! You were _twelve_. That's illegal!"

"Whereas working as Orochimaru's personal murderer for three years is perfectly legal, you mean? Laws don't matter anymore than any other arbitrarily decided nonsense rules."

"Oh, of course," Naruto says with a horrible kind of flippancy. His heart is beating triple time. "Stupid me. Obviously executing criminals is every bit as bad as tricking a child so you can rape him!"

Sasuke sits abruptly upright, stark and white as he sneers between bloodless lips, fingers gripping the armrests, "I was not a child, I was not tricked, and I most certainly was not raped!"

"Boys," Kakashi cautions with mild disinterest, gaze never leaving his book. "Continued screaming will alert Tsunade."

"You're not going to say anything of consequence, are you," Naruto realizes, his stomach, thick with venom, doing uncoordinated back-flips as he turns to look at the untouchable man. "No, forget it – there's nothing you could say to justify this."

(no matter how terribly i want there to be. oh, prove me wrong)

But he knows that's not going to happen. When has Kakashi ever proved a dark suspicion wrong?

(it isn't fair – you made us trust)

His vision swims with terror at his own lack of honest surprise (_i wanted to be better than this_).

Kakashi shrugs, grins weakly to himself before closing his book.

"I agree that it was a bad thing to do. Doesn't mean I see any reason I owe you penance or explanations."

(_sasuke_ owns my conscience)

Naruto splutters.

Sasuke nods thoughtfully. "Leave us alone."

"I'm really not supposed to."

"Nor were you supposed to sleep with me."

"Touché."

Only the two of us, in the end.

"Leave well enough alone," Sasuke orders him, looking rather like a sullen beat-up child. "I realize this might be beyond your limited mental horizon, but some things are more complicated than you think!"

"Oh, _try me_," Naruto demands.

"Fine," Sasuke answers the challenge. "It was a simple business exchange. He gave me what I wanted, I gave him what he wanted."

The world moves slower now, slow with dread. "So, instead of abuse, you're saying it was an act of – of prostitution? You let him fuck you in exchange for teaching you the Chidori?"

"Yes. For the record I also slept with him four times during our recent mission in Country of Water."

A few minutes later Naruto discovers that the beddings have ripped between his fingers and that his hands are a study in red and white. White because he's fisting them so hard, red because some kind of seals are flaming across his skin.

"If Kyuubi snaps free I'll kill you," Sasuke informs him dispassionately.

"Why?" His eyes are glossy. How embarrassing. Like he really needs to offer Sasuke the opportunity to belt him another one.

Like Sasuke can do anything that matters after this.

"Why would you –do that? He _hurt_ you."

"At least he never lied about it," Sasuke snaps sharply. "Maybe it's because he never had it, but he didn't break anyone's trust. And maybe it's because he never had the opportunity, but he didn't fail to recognize who's me and who isn't either!"

"Can't you see I had to believe it was you?" Naruto yells at him, because Sasuke has to believe him and nothing's fair or safe anymore. "Or I'd go mad!"

"You've been mad for quite some time already," Sasuke remarks caustically. "Honestly, that was the worst nightmare your mind could produce? Killing me in the, The Valley at the End."

"You know that!" Naruto roars. _Is this some kind of test? What the hell are you doing, Sasuke? Giving me a Tsukiyomi and acting like this, you distrustful little shit_.

"Oh really now?" There's a bit of fire there at last, of the old childish rivalry and hated caring, but muted down almost into nothingness with a miniscule shake of his head. "I'd call it delusions of grandeur, myself." He stares at Naruto, eyes unaccustomedly open. "If killing me is the worst nightmare you can imagine, why give it such a sterling try half a week ago?"

And Naruto's blood abruptly runs cold, seals burning with renewed fervor against suddenly-clammy skin.

"No," he protests, obviously clutching at straws. "But that – didn't happen! It – I wouldn't! Oh god oh hell oh god, did I – ohmigod, Sasuke, did I–"

"I don't know," Sasuke says shortly. Elaborates impatiently, after Naruto has stared despair at him for some time, "It's all a little blurry around the edges, and I am sure you understand if I am something less than eager to reminisce!"

"What – what did happen, then? Tell me what was nightmare and what wasn't."

"You turned up in the border-country and we had a fight."

"What – does that mean, exactly?" And his voice is gravel and the world is a far away horror, and he can't connect through the dizzying, sickening possibility of what he might have done.

Sasuke shrugs, face tight. "I was stupid. Made a mistake. You beat me up. You vi – you beat me up. I awarded you a Tsukiyomi, which you should be damn grateful for because it puts me one step closer to blindness." He smiles, and it is vicious, malicious (breaking). "Heh, I guess I broke you after all, in The Valley at the End. It's why you aren't trustable anymore, and no one can go back or forward from breaking." We both know that.

"You could have stopped me," Naruto says. "Hindered me, at least! Why the hell did you let me?"

Sasuke's face is thoughtful and innocent, with not a whisper of red or gold to the eyes. He looks exceptionally mundane.

"Would you believe," he muses, and yes, Naruto must have done something that far outstrips his ability to describe for Sasuke to retain this dream-like quality as he continues, "that I actually trusted you? That I really thought you'd never mean to hurt me."

And with the words Naruto is adrift in a sea of horror, and he never learned to swim and drowning has to be better than this.

It wasn't Sasuke who turned, this time.

(it was i)

"Sasuke," he tries, and it comes out a hoarse croak, some kind of damning prayer.

"I'm leaving."

Okay, Naruto decides somewhere far away where everything is muted. Okay, he tries to say, but he's disconnected, trapped inside his own actions, and could there be anything worse or more ironical or befitting?

Iruka-sensei bursts in several minutes later, cheerful anxiety radiating from his person.

"Naruto!" he beams, doing a rather credibly imitation of Gai-sensei as he bounces up to the bedside and plops down on the chair Sasuke recently evacuated. "How are you feeling? You look rather pale, though I suppose that's the least one might expect. Honestly, fighting with Sasuke _again_…!" The admonishment might be real, but the mother-hen-like clucking that accompanies it sort of invalidates its potential as a serious reprimand.

"I didn't," Naruto protests, like he has a million times before. Except it's not a shout, just a listless whisper.

Except this time he's not lying.

"Of course you did," Iruka-sensei argues sternly. "You both came back horribly beat up, I was worried sick, thank god Jiraiya-sama handled the matter. Still, thank heaven, it turned out alright. I know you didn't mean anything bad. How about it, are you well enough for a ramen dinner? My treat."

"We didn't fight," Naruto insists softly, "and it turned out anything but," and he's choking, "anything but alright."

(_shit, and i accused _kakashi _of being a backstabbing asshole?_)

(_…it would have been a betrayal and naruto isn't ever going to allow that, isn't ever going to be a traitor. _

_there isn't a worse thing in the world_)

(than me oh god oh hell oh shit than me)

"Naruto…"

He looks up at Iruka-sensei quite suddenly, can't keep staring at his own seal-stained hands anymore and see the reason for those seals superimposed over them, blind for how he knows Iruka-sensei needs to be sheltered.

If, against odds, Iruka-sensei actually understands – well, he's going to hate me, but comprehension has to be worth more than an occasional junk food dinner and a practiced smile of instructive encouragement.

"Are there things that can't be forgiven?" he asks, gritting out the words.

"Wha?" His teacher is obviously flabbergasted. "What do you mean?"

"I meant what I said. Are there things that are so bad they can't be forgiven?"

"I don't think so, Naruto. Forgiveness is hard, but it's never impossible."

And that shouldn't make it worse. Iruka-sensei _doesn't think_ – more often than not that means Sasuke _does know_. Because Iruka-sensei doesn't think you leave the village, doesn't think you can love someone you also quite like to see in pain when he's hurt you. Doesn't think you can need attention any way it's possible to get it.

"Could you forgive Kyuubi?"

Iruka-sensei's kindly expression of accustomed worry freezes, the reaching hand falling down into his lap.

"Kyuubi isn't human, Naruto," he says. "It's a demon god. It operates beyond the boundaries of forgiveness."

Naruto gives him a blank look of slowly crumbling hope.

"That's just a fancier way of saying there is stuff you can't forgive after all." He's learned something from living with Sasuke, after all.

"Not really," Iruka-sensei says. "It's like… if you or I killed a child that'd be evil, right? But if a wolf did it, it wouldn't be. Not because it hurt the child or the parents any less, but because the wolf doesn't understand about right and wrong. It's just about instinct and survival. It can't help it. And it's the same thing with the Fox Demon of the Nine Tails. It wasn't immoral of it to destroy our village but amoral, because it can never comprehend moral."

Of course, ironically, this makes it perfectly alright for Sasuke to act like a murderous jerk, because let's face it, the Uchiha is more predator than humane.

_(can't you see it's wrong to treat other people like they're just toys, tools?_

…_no. i don't, and i'm not interested in trying) _

"But," Naruto goes on, weak with fear, "if – if Kyuubi had been human? If it had been a human doing it?"

Iruka-sensei is perplexed and uncomfortable. "I… I like to think there are reasons for human acts. That there are explanations, if not excuses. That no one is entirely responsible for their destiny. But maybe, no. I don't think I'm a good enough man to forgive that. I wish I were, but… Why are you asking? Naruto, you know you and Kyuubi are separate entitles, that you don't have to feel bad about anything it's done."

"It didn't do this," Naruto confesses, slumped in on himself. If _Iruka-sensei_ can't forgive… (and i have never entirely forgiven sasuke for valley at the end, i know that, and this is no better). "I did."

"Is this about what happened with Sasuke?"

Naruto nods, shakes his head, bites his lip. Admits the horrible secret: "He wasn't fighting back."

"What are you saying? But…"

Naruto won't look at him (can't, really).

"But – but he'd hit you with a Tsukiyomi! That's fighting back. I mean, I know you came in unhurt, but wasn't that because of…Kyuubi?"

Naruto shakes his head as best as he's able with his fronthead pressed to his knees. "There wasn't much for it to heal. Couple bruises at most."

"But then… why? Why would you continue to hurt him if he didn't…?" Iruka-sensei sounds bewildered, at a loss, wistful denial shattering.

"I was angry. I had to make sure he was only mine!"

"Naruto…" Care, despite the shock, and – disgust. "That's sick."

"Don't you think I know that?" he yells, muted against his legs. "See these seals all over me? They're because Jiraiya half erased the original one, and… and we – snapped."

"Hey," Iruka-sensei says. "Hey, Naruto, shhhh, it's okay, shhh, it's gonna be alright."

Except it's not.

xxxxx

"Sasuke."

Oh great, Sakura's been waiting for him.

"What? No, forget it, whatever it is, I'm not in the mood."

Could her smile be any more condescending?

"I just thought you might want to get that check on your spine out of the way so you can rest."

That check on your spine – what an innocent way of putting it. Like his spine wasn't broken clean off, crunched apart by Naruto's chakra-laden hands.

"I'm sick and tired of resting, and no one is to touch me."

"I'm glad to see you shook off that non-feeling depression, at least," she says with a weak parody of a grin.

Sasuke punches the wall, only mildly embarrassed when he forgets to check the blow and his hands ends up on the far side of it.

"Fucking Naruto!"

"Yes," she says mildly, "that's what you usually do about now, isn't it?"

Alright, that plan to make her not be shit-scared of him that seemed like such a good idea when he first conducted it?

Worked a little too well, as it turns out.

"Shut up," he sneers, retrieving his wayward limb.

"Sasuke-kun," she calls after him. "Where are you going?"

He isn't sure why he pauses, taut with snapping patience, and announces, "I am going to go to the training yard, conjure a dozen clones and kill them in creative ways."

"Oh, come on, you're over-stressed from the healing and, what is it now, just shy of three weeks pregnant? Not gonna happen."

Why is he still here?

He wouldn't be, if the light weren't so dizzying, his limbs not so molten lead-y, heavy with feverish aches.

(if he could allow himself to think beyond the blinding, glaring event etched into his memory with mercilessly sharp lines)

"And how exactly are you planning to prevent it?"

"I was hoping by appealing to your sense."

"I'm not going to stay in the hospital another night."

"I suppose you'll heal just as well outside it," she grudgingly agrees. "Where are you going, then?"

Not home, that's for certain. No matter, he can sleep in a tree or something.

"I thought as much," Sakura sighs. "Come on. You can stay at my house."

"I am not in the mood to humor your parents." Fair warning – he owes her that, at least. Will give it to her, whether he owes it or not.

"They'll stay out of the way. Come on now."

Her place is no better or worse than any other, and if she is willing to risk her parents' necks, fine by him.

"Wait here a minute, would you?" she asks outside the door, slipping inside to warn off her parents.

"We're having a sleepover," she tells her mom. "She's not feeling too well, so I figured I could just bring her some food after dinner."

"Of course," her mother beams, apparently relieved it is only a matter of a female friend, nothing threatening. "I heard from your father that she was such a well-behaved little thing, too."

"Er," Sakura says. "Right."

Sasuke has fulfilled her request with unusual obedience, looking half asleep as he stares listlessly at her mother's prize flowerbeds.

He continues to look a sleepwalker as she directs him up the stairs and into her room, eyes half-lidded and dull, steps labored.

Of course, four days is not a very long time to recover from multiple physical traumas of the gravest severity and personal tragedy.

He's obviously not going to eat and would probably fall asleep while washing off. Shrugging, she nods at the bed.

"Thanks," he mutters, kicking off his shoes and immediately slumping.

She had not expected a person making his living off murder, betrayal and prostitution to look innocent in his sleep, but he does. Reminds her forcibly of the boy she loved, when she was a silly honest little girl alight with first love.

She shakes her head, not entirely in bitterness, and leaves the room to have dinner and a shower.

When she returns, an hour later or thereabout, he is fast asleep, curled on his side and showing little more than a mop of dark hair over the edge of the coverlet.

There is also, she notes with considerably less fondness, a snake lying curled on the floor beside the bed. Maybe twice her size, scales glowing a dim gray-green in the shadowy room, all sinuous movement and the whisper of rough skin on linoleum as it stretches it neck towards her.

"Oh, god. Oh, shit."

At least it doesn't appear aggressive, lying back down with a hiss after, as it appears, having conducted a brief inspection of her person.

Alright, so logically Sasuke must have summoned it as a guardian and it's letting her through either because he trusts her (in which case very flattering) or because it doesn't consider her a threat (in which case very humiliating).

After the Forest of Death three years ago she is wary around reptiles and inches past it slowly, studying her sleeping companion for a few tender, exasperated moments before crawling into bed next to him. He's really gay, after all, despite weird words and a kiss in the hospital, so it can hardly count as an assault upon either one's virtue.

"S'k'ra?" Sasuke mutters with sleepy incoherence into the pillow as she slips below the coverlet, brushing lightly against his back.

"Yeah," she whispers back, and he either nods or just curls up more comfortably, asleep again before he ever quite woke up.

She's never lain quite this close to anyone, not with unfamiliar scents tickling her nose (she identifies blood, dried sweat and the sterile smell of hospital soap, but knows they aren't all) and the hot arc of a spine cutting into her side. It's not a large bed at all, but Sasuke's a blessedly calm sleeper, silent and still and with his back discreetly turned.

It is only hours later that his presence truly disturbs her, when she wakes up to the relentless pressure of trained assassin's hands on her throat. Her eyes blink open wide and teary in darkness lit only by the muted redness of the spinning Sharingan, the white figure kneeling over her.

xxxxxxxxxx


	22. Sasuke Doesn't Live Here Anymore

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 22:**

"**Sasuke Doesn't Live Here Anymore"**

Kakashi does not look particularly happy to see him.

He isn't, either, opened the door only because it was apparent the knocker wouldn't let him go back to sleep until he did, because of which rousing to kill the intruder presented itself as the path of least resistance.

And outside the door he found Sasuke, is staring now impassively at the blank face and dull eyes that are too light, too much like Orochimaru's and too little like Sasuke's.

"I almost killed Sakura," Sasuke explains at length, seemingly quite comfortable standing in the doorway in the middle of the night being scrutinized.

Kakashi sighs. "Come on in."

Sasuke nods and slips past him, hardly affording the familiar surroundings a glance. He's tired but restless, skittish. He feels as though his body is an unfamiliar outfit in some itchy material, wrapped too tightly around his person.

He'd consider trying to take it off, were it not for the certainty that nudity is hardly pleasant either. Needs something to act as a meat shield between him and the red madness.

He sits at the kitchen table, studying his own drumming fingertips: tired of nightmares, wanting to wake up.

Kakashi stands watching him discreetly from over by the counter. "Tea?"

Eventually realizing he's being addressed, he shakes his head.

"I'm going to sleep," he announces at last, reluctant but unable to find anything else to do. "I'll know and be very upset if you try anything."

Waiting for an answer is pointless (it wasn't a question, just fair warning).

In the bedroom he gets down on his knees with great care, pulling piles of junk away until the space beneath the bed is large enough to accommodate a modestly sized body, though still partly occupied by unsorted stuff and exceedingly dusty.

After a bit of consideration he nicks a pillow before crawling in, protected on all sides – wall behind his back and above the top of his head, stashes of junk under his feet and crowding his legs, the underside of the mattress a gray protective sky above him. He can look out into the small, barely-lit room for as long as he wants, calmed by the emptiness and stillness. There is nothing here that can turn on him.

The atmosphere changes marginally an hour later, when Kakashi sits down in a corner, fluffing an extra pillow and adjusting it behind his back before reclining against the wall, seemingly fast asleep mere minutes after settling in.

Gradually Sasuke can relax.

It becomes uncomfortably clear to the both of them over the next few days that what he is doing is going slowly, irredeemably insane. That he is coming apart at the seams, and the stuffing spilling out isn't pretty or recoverable.

After first making the discovery, Sasuke finds he doesn't really care.

Kakashi watches him, knowing the only one who could conceivably help is the one responsible and thus unavailable. There is nothing to be done except humoring.

In the hospital when Sasuke shut himself off completely Kakashi's presence didn't matter any more than Sakura's – when Naruto awoke Sasuke was forced back into the world. Naruto is the one who paints life in color for Sasuke, the only one.

The hue of choice, as of late, seems to be crimson. A brilliant, bitter redness, and Sasuke rests in it, isn't attempting to look away. Why should he, with the insides of his eyelids no less bloody than the world they should protect him from?

Under Kakashi's helpless watchful eyes Sasuke leads an indoor life. He reads scrolls and books, techniques and fiction, curled up contentedly on his side. Practices calligraphy, with long, swift strikes of the brush, hands moving with a certainty so definite it breeds nonchalance. Kakashi knows the handwriting to be utterly disconnected to the fast scrawl Sasuke normally employs, hard edgy little letters, like bad type.

He dreams more than Kakashi thought anyone could, sleeping and awake both.

(_you're going to fall into the red darkness between the layers of the world, and i am waiting for you there, with all your lost ones, sasuke-kun_)

He is also growing thinner instead of fatter even though he's still most of the time, stress eating him out from inside.

Luckily it's easy enough to feed him when he labors under the impression that Kakashi is in fact Uchiha Mikoto. Sasuke will set the table, flit around him, smile and cling to his hand. Kakashi looks down into his set, anxious face, and Sasuke is innocent, he has never hurt anyone, is so wrong.

Considerably harder is handling the situation when Sasuke hides in the wardrobe or under the bed, asking Kakashi or Itachi or whomever it is he sees to please don't kill him.

He's snappish and sullen with Orochimaru, frustrated and nauseous.

Mild and scornful with lack of comprehension around Sakura.

Calm, bared of emotion, with Kakashi himself.

Only Naruto seems to have been utterly stripped from his life.

However, Kakashi remains disturbingly certain it is not Sasuke who has the memories to relive of old conversations with Jiraiya or Tsunade. Who tells Anko she's a good girl, tells Kimimaro that he should make death be a dance, insults and flatters Kabuto.

Or maybe that last one could be my brat after all.

"What's going on with you?" he asks tiredly at last one afternoon when Sasuke is studying his ink-stained fingers again, sitting at the kitchen table writing red calligraphy. The only question is whose blood it is he's using – Kakashi's jaw is throbbing and he has several nasty scratches from last time Sasuke snapped, the kid's own arms are patterns of lines and abrasions from when he's hugged himself too tightly in fright, and Kakashi has lost count of how many snakes he's gotten rid off. Sasuke likes to call his summons forth and socialize with them in that creepy silent way he has, only to be terrified of the animals when he reverts back to relative innocence.

Kakashi has told him to just stop summoning the damn things, who do you think kills them when you start screaming and anyway, I've managed to keep everyone else away this far, but if the building explodes around a gigantic reptile that lucky stint won't last.

(sasuke of course has not suddenly picked up the habit of listening to anyone whose death would not have granted him the mangekyou sharingan)

He looks up now, studying Kakashi calmly and not without benevolence, irises golden around pupils slit like half-moons, like a sorcerer's.

"What was Sasuke is breaking apart," the figure tells him. "This means he stopped caring about who is in charge of the body, and what was Orochimaru saw its chance. They are merging, now. There will be no coming back."

"Then what are you?"

"A possibility," the figure says, as though he really cannot believe this was not obvious.

A blink later the eyes are red, and after strained hours spent assuring Sasuke that Itachi really isn't going to kill him and Orochimaru isn't going to rape him and Father is going to be proud of him one day, they revert to the old bruise-black hue.

"I loved you," Sasuke says. "I'm sorry that doesn't count for anything."

And there is desperation, even before Kakashi starts wondering whether it was a singular or a plural you.

Too late, of course. It was too late the day Itachi snapped, doom finalized when Naruto joined the abusive madness in which Sasuke was already getting lost.

A day later Sasuke appears to reach a decision of some kind, lies down to sleep again and doesn't stir for almost thirty hours. When he does he is calm for the first time in…a long while. Ever, perhaps, in a manner of speaking.

Like he isn't actually broken, isn't in pieces.

And I'm not.

(what used to be uchiha sasuke was, but not orochimaru, at least not to either one's knowledge)

He looks out into a world that means nothing, because he has the distance now to realize that the things that tied him to it were the same things that broke him, and he's whole now but adrift.

I'm fine with that, really.

Thinks back through the assorted memories, goes through the death of his mother, the betrayal of his teacher, the death of his body; the slaughter of his clan, the intrusion of his mind, the death of his brother – goes through it like it were mute film, old images in tones of sepia brown, drying blood-brown.

Well.

If it doesn't feel imminently important, he supposes that means it is not, in fact, immensely important. Really, just because the parts that were used to create the current me cared about it – it doesn't mean it has to carry any meaning for _me_.

He shrugs, pushes the ratty coverlet aside and gets to his feet, discovering that he rather likes the body he wears. Fully healed at last, it's supple and strong, responding fast to his will. Good.

Hungry or not, he supposes he should eat. His stomach is still flat, his breasts less than a handful flesh each, but he reckons he would have noticed a miscarriage (survival; instinct; duty; doing what you must; hating everything - survival: supposedly desirable).

The red darkness parts for him as he starts walking.

Kakashi is slouching in the stuffed chair propped against the kitchen table, struggling with some piece of writing.

Sasuke remembers him from their brief interaction some days earlier, when the man interrupted his calligraphy.

It is uncomfortably clear to Kakashi the moment Sasuke steps into the doorway that some kind of line has been crossed. Looking up after the sparse respite he allows himself before facing the facts, he stares into golden eyes with slit pupils.

"Breakfast?" he asks tiredly, because he believes, lets himself believe like the lovesick idiot he is, that Sasuke, no matter how he was broken and in what order the pieces had to be fitted back together to form a person who could distance himself enough from the memories to survive, no matter the fact Orochimaru's merging jutsu has obviously been taken as far as it is possible for it to go – no matter the fact that this is a new individual, born from Orochimaru's influence and the broken bits of what used to be Sasuke, Kakashi believes Sasuke won't kill him.

It's the same basic ingredients that made up Sasuke, after all, only mixed together now in accordance with a recipe called Orochimaru. Sort of. I think.

(more importantly, kakashi couldn't stop him anyway if he tried, couldn't want to stop him, so might as well just make the best of the situation)

Sasuke sits down wordlessly and nicks toast from Kakashi's barely touched plate, chewing thoughtfully. The bread tastes like the memories of two lives tell him it should, crunchy and lukewarm.

The next three days pass in a fashion frankly disturbingly similar to those that went before. Sasuke is reacquainting himself with the world, trying out anew the same unstructured routines of eating, reading and writing. He still sleeps under the bed half the time, but allows Kakashi to tuck them both in for an occasional nap.

Sasuke lies pliant and bored with one of the man's arms draped over his waist and the man's even breath and occasional snore tumbling against the nape of his neck.

Kakashi is safe – Kakashi is utterly disinteresting. A comfort, never a challenge.

(the vacuum will have to come to an end soon)

xxxxx

Naruto is lying on his back, staring at Iruka-sensei's ceiling. He knows it worries his teacher, but is able to find neither the energy nor the incentive to move. Which is what is worrying Iruka-sensei, but Naruto can't seem to care anymore.

"Naruto," his old confidant asks uncomfortably from the doorway. "Don't you want some lunch? We could have ramen? Or I can cook for us. What would you like?"

Frankly Naruto only wants him to go away, because he is curling inwards on a note of pain and Iruka-sensei doesn't need to see that. Doesn't need to have it shown in his face that Naruto isn't getting better from staying with him, as he's been doing since he was let out of the hospital because he can't go home. He owes Iruka-sensei better than an in your face show that the man doesn't understand, but really he should have learned by now that Naruto doesn't want to eat (doesn't want to breathe, nursing his infected inside scars, able to feel nothing beyond sasuke's fist around his heart, the contents of sasuke's chest slimy and bursting open around my own fingers), can't leave the house.

If they were to have ramen Iruka-sensei would have to go and buy it for them, then bring it home to eat, because after Kyuubi's latest stint Naruto is back to being hated with abandon. Strange women and kids scream when they see him, men huff and fist their hands. Mr. Ramen Man hurried to give them a meal for free the one time Naruto let Iruka-sensei drag him there, then asked Naruto to please stay away for a bit, nothing personal, kid, I believe in you, but it's – I don't want my livelihood vandalized.

He didn't care to defend himself when he was finally attacked – he's a ninja and they're only civilians, and he deserves all the pain he can get (_kyuubi_ is the one that craves lashing out, not me, please not me). Because he's something to be seriously feared, now they know he is capable of more than was ever assumed, and standing out is never forgiven a drop-out who should've known better than to dare fill his lungs with others' air, scream his own name into the wind.

It worried Iruka-sensei sick though, the way he let them hurt him, even though Naruto was perfectly fine two days later despite the new seals, and because of that Naruto hasn't wandered outside since.

He's going slowly insane, coped up like this, but he can't seem to care about that either. _I guess I broke you after all, in The Valley at the End._

(he hardly dares to breathe for fear it will wake the kyuubi completely)

"Naruto?" Iruka-sensei repeats. "What would you like? For lunch."

His head feels thick, like he's watching the world through a fog, and he doesn't know what to answer. Tries grinning, which only makes Iruka-sensei wince.

"Don't," the man asks, mild and anguished as always he has been. Least for as long as Naruto has known him – after his parents were gulped down by Kyuubi. "It's – don't fake it. Your whole face just freezes up in pain before you force it to smile. Don't."

"Okay," Naruto says dumbly.

"Naruto!" someone calls then, and there are running footfalls on the stairs.

"Sakura," Iruka-sensei announces. The girl was here once before, but between her old teacher's encouragement for her to leave fast and Naruto's moody silence she did not stay long.

"Hello, Iruka-sensei. I really need to talk to Naruto. At once. It's important."

Naruto wishes he could find the energy to move into a sitting position as Iruka-sensei closes the door on them, leaving them alone, but it's the second time he's broken his promise to her and this time he broke more than that.

"Naruto," she pants, flushed from her run, blurts it all out, "I overheard Kakashi talking to Tsunade-sama. About Sasuke. He said, like, that it was too much for him, so he stopped caring about being Sasuke, so Orochimaru's merging jutsu finished. Only, apparently it didn't really work as it was supposed to because it had been suppressed for so long, and now no one knows if Sasuke's… at all alright in the head."

Unbelievably tactless, and he's always thought only he could possibly be that bad, but apparently he was wrong about that too.

Can denial change the world?

(seems not, because sakura-chan isn't retracting her statement, only glares at him impatiently)

"Come on, Naruto, get up! You need to talk to him and fix this!"

"I can't. Don't you see? I _did_ this!"

"Oh, get real. Sasuke was broken a long time ago, it's nothing short of a miracle he's held together this long." The words wash over him, scathing, soothing, too much and turning everything upside-down. "Just think about it, what would you expect from someone with his background? Besides, it's not like Sasuke never betrayed us or almost killed you. What's the difference this time?"

"He is!" Naruto cries, roars. "He's – not himself, and he finally believed in something, and I ruined it!"

"Not himself?" Sakura-chan echoes, mild suddenly. "Naruto, you've never known the Sasuke who existed before tragedy. Honestly, you didn't speak to him once before Massacre Night, did you? Our Sasuke has always been stunted, just to… varying degree."

She pauses to push hair out of her face. "This is what happened. Sasuke cheated on you. You got mad. The two of you fought, and it ended in something like a tie. Then for some reason afterwards Sasuke just shut himself off from everything. Couldn't feel a thing even if he'd wanted to, which obviously he didn't. You never saw him at his worst, Naruto – I mean you saw The Valley at the End, obviously, but that wasn't… wasn't like this."

She takes a deep breath, drawing air to the bottom of her lungs. "Because then you wake up, and there he is, and the ice mask is melting off in chunks. He was really furious after he'd talked to you and not about to stay in the hospital, so I brought him home. That went pretty well until midnight when I – woke up from him trying to… kill me. He'd, he'd forgotten who I was. Anyway, he stopped in time, and we sent him off to Kakashi because you were out of commission. Naruto, can't you see? You need to take care of this. You're the only one who can because frankly I'm starting to suspect you're the only one who really – really matters to him. You're the only one who can break through to him."

He sees what they cost her, those words.

("i – woke up from him trying to… kill me")

(he'd forgotten who i was)

(_you're the only one who really – really matters to him)_

"Okay," he says again, only this time the word is neither dull nor dumb. Sakura-chan is always right, after all. "Thanks."

She thinks she might cry, because it's finally his smile, more garish than the summer sun.

Off the bed and down the stairs, stopping in the doorway because he should probably tell Iruka-sensei he's going out, turns around to do so and – where is the man?

There is something nagging at him about that, but he doesn't have time, Sakura-chan can fill him in if he worries.

_(sasuke!)_

xxxxx

"Hello?" someone calls through the door, some amount of time after Kakashi left.

A man, Sasuke decides, an uncomfortable but determined man.

Unlocking and opening, he looks up into a broad, tanned face with a large gash across the nose.

"Iruka-sensei," his memory supplies. A kind man, a stupid man.

"Sasuke-kun," Iruka stutters out, eyes wide on him. "May I come in?"

Sasuke nods, stepping back to leave room in the minimal hallway, following Iruka into the kitchen, noting the man's distressed staring at the overtopped furniture and the splotches of old blood (sasuke's had a rough morning, between boredom and memories trying to convince him of their relevance).

"I… think we should talk," Iruka continues at last, fiddling with the dishes left in the sink. "I'm not sure exactly what happened, I know that, but the current state of affairs isn't working. Surely you can see this? I – don't think you're good for Naruto and–"

"That's forbidden," Sasuke interrupts sharply. Forbidden to think about, forbidden to remember, forbidden to speak of.

"What?" Iruka is not afraid yet, not quite, but definitely jittery. "Do you mean Nar–"

Ordering him to shut up would take too much time, and anyway Sasuke doesn't want to waste his breath on talk to this man. He simply hits him instead, his hand connecting solidly with Iruka's head and locking around the skull, forcing the teacher down until he's sitting on the floor with Sasuke kneeling in front of him.

"W- what are you doing? This is–"

"Hush," Sasuke whispers, a finger across his lips. "I think we'll have to do this the hard way."

(the interesting way)

Iruka moans and trashes in protest but can't get up and stops trying after Sasuke dislocates his legs. The whimpering starts in earnest when he proceeds to open the man's vest and shirt, baring an expanse of stomach, softening muscle under lightly scarred skin.

Sasuke has scars too. The most important ones are all located on his neck, including the ladder of finger-nail imprints climbing up his throat. They remained, even after the bruises under them faded. Sasuke doesn't mind, but he isn't allowed to think about that.

Concentrates instead on tracing Iruka's stomach with the chakra blade, watching the leaking blood with approval.

He is considering moving on, either into the stomach or up to the torso, when the door is knocked on again, harder this time.

"Sasuke! It's me, Naruto! Open up!"

"Naruto!" Iruka cries with something like relief and desperation and – shame. "Help!"

"Iruka-sensei?" His voice is puzzled but he wastes no time kicking in the door, jumping inside the apartment to – freeze, just like Sasuke did the moment Naruto announced himself.

"Sasuke," he whispers at last, the word rendered a lie by his staring into Orochimaru's eyes in Sasuke's face. His voice firms, hands fisting themselves at his sides. "Step away from Iruka-sensei!"

_(and it's not his fault, but – i don't think he's capable of loving anyone, not like we mean it)_

He expects a fight, is steeling himself for it, but the first blow never comes.

Sasuke has thought, before: It is very tedious to be invincible. It's wearisome and boring to be above all feeling.

Pride goeth before fall, because it's here now. You're here now.

The forbidden.

The feeling.

Naruto.

_(naruto)_

Orochimaru was driven by the blind need to feel something, anything at all, because he simply couldn't and the listless frustration drove him ever onwards on his search for any emotion.

Sasuke fought feeling, ran towards solitude.

It doesn't seem to matter.

Iruka coughs wetly beside him, and Naruto is across the room, leaning over them both.

"Why the hell did you hurt _him_?" is the first thing Naruto says to him, proceeding to force his reluctant attention to the injured man. "Shit, Iruka-sensei, how are you? How bad is it?"

"He was in the way," Sasuke replies. "He doesn't matter." (nothing matters, save how naruto's presence makes that claim a falsehood)

"Yes he does!"

Sasuke isn't in the mood to listen to the tirade that will follow, forces an arm past the blond to push a hand alight with healing chakra to Iruka's torn abdomen.

It doesn't knot up flawlessly, because frankly Sasuke's execution of the perfectly copied healing jutsu is mediocre at best – like all techniques these ones require a modicum of will, and he could care less about a stupid stranger's health. The man will live, all the same.

For now he is unconscious, but peacefully so.

"Sasuke."

"Naruto."

He's staring, he knows that. Should probably care, but doesn't. Probably shouldn't like what he sees, but does.

"You're – mad?"

"I am," Sasuke affirms with a shrug, because Naruto might have shock-started his emotions but his new mind is not equipped to deal with this. "But in the end you did the natural thing. What anyone would have done." He looks briefly away. "Perhaps it means I can finally respect your opinions."

This is too absurd – that Sasuke should value love more if it's conditional, can only respect someone who is liable to betray him.

Ironically, sickeningly, that's what drives home the reality that this is Sasuke. The yellow eyes and red hands don't matter, not really, not in that regard.

But it's Iruka-sensei's blood on those hands now healing, and it's Naruto's hands that have left those scars on Sasuke's neck.

"Fight me," Sasuke says.

Naruto wishes he could. "The Kyuubi seal is really unstable."

Sasuke nods, sharp and thoughtful. His eventual smile is nothing short of evil.

"Do you want me to redo it? Place a new one on you?" (beat) "Do you want me to take it off completely?"

Naruto tries to hinder him, but with Kyuubi sealed as thoroughly as it is at present Sasuke is worlds faster, pushes Naruto backwards until the his backside connects solidly with the floor, until Sasuke's hand is spread over the key painted around Naruto's navel, itching with what he tells himself is only the strain of immense chakra.

"What are you doing?" Naruto asks, pushing himself up on his elbows, staring with furrowed brows but no anger, not yet, at Sasuke kneeling over him.

Sasuke tightens his hand on the stomach, smooth skin crumpling under his fingers, demon chakra twisting around the digits.

And the emotion twisting Naruto's features into a frown isn't lack of understanding or faint irritation or genuine worry anymore (just pain).

"You don't want to fight me as long as the Kyuubi is likely to take over, right?" Sasuke asks rhetorically, using his legs to lock Naruto in position while his hands form complicated seals. "Then how about this?" And he presses the jutsu into Naruto's body, feels his chakra tear through flesh and spirit (hears naruto scream). "Do you want to know what it's like to be helpless, Naruto?"

Naruto chokes on thick anguish, staring into eyes that are mercifully, mercilessly red.

What he says, what he has to say, what is the fight and robs it from him, is: "Is this what you felt like?"

Is this what I could do to you?

(helplessness that stems always at heart from betrayed trust)

"I felt nothing," Sasuke growls. Crouching over Naruto, dusty hair and loose shirt falling haphazardly about him, he has never been more beautiful or more animal – animal in the way a child is, something failed and raging at its own pain and – fundamentally incomplete. "You know nothing about what I feel!"

"I know you love me," Naruto screeches between the white dots in his vision, between the spasms of hurt, the vicious pumping of his heart.

And the part of Sasuke that could love screams, but the past tense is what it is, and most of him knows not how.

He sits back for a moment, frozen in time, the Sharingan retreating from eyes locked with Naruto's pain-blind, sky-blue ones.

It is clear to him suddenly, how this has to end.

The only true ending.

One of them has to die – who doesn't really matter.

He can't take a world with Naruto in it, it's that simple. Naruto is too much, too unquenchable and _good_, and Sasuke can't handle another invasion, however kindly meant.

Can't take a world without him either, unfortunately, for all the emptiness. For there not really being anything worth the name of world without Naruto.

"I need you," he husks, and finishes the seal on Naruto's abdomen.

He's panting and lightheaded, heart beating so slowly he thinks it might be about to stop, stomach acid leaking into the rest of his body (i want, more than i have ever wanted anything in my life).

Kyuubi is sealed: Naruto won't heal this time. There will be no more miracles.

He closes one hand gingerly around Naruto's windpipe, the tips of his nails painted a sharp red by the blood they press forth. The other hand he lets sparkle with the Chidori (the innermost blue flame of fire) and he lays it gently upon Naruto's heart.

Naruto stares up at Sasuke, and can't believe.

Remembers a childhood story no one would tell him.

_('…we can't help remembering her. when she left, you see, she took with her something that we couldn't do without , nor could we live with it: something precious and deadly-'_

'_what was it?' asked cho, puzzled by his hungry eyes._

'_hope,' whispered the librarian. 'it was hope')_

xxxxxxxxxx

(**a/n: **the childhood story piece is actually a quote from _divine endurance_ by gwyneth jones)


	23. Something Precious and Deadly

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 23:**

"**Something Precious and Deadly"**

Naruto doesn't want to die.

He will someday, he guesses, and there has never been any doubt that Sasuke will be involved. It was brought into lethal focus in The Valley at the End but existed long before then, that red string of fate that'll draw us in and knot around us, existed even before Country of the Wave, even before the first ninja test with Kakashi all those many (too few) years ago.

Dying on the floor of Kakashi's kitchen, under Iruka-sensei's sleeping stare, is disarmingly unheroic, without pretenses (people will laugh).

It's not so bad, as deaths go.

If Sasuke really, really wants to kill him – Naruto can't hold grudges. His life is Sasuke's, he's decided that. Or it was decided for him (country of the wave, valley at the end, fucking love you asshole).

Yes, Sasuke must have been right: Sasuke must really have broken him for him to think this, and there is no denying he does.

If Sasuke really, really wants to kill me, I do not think I want to live anyway.

He doesn't want to die, but for him to want to live Sasuke must not want him dead, and – and… Slow, weary despair cushions the tearing agony of frustrated hatred for this stupid love that ruins everything.

"You have the Mangekyou already," he husks through his constricting throat, the only stupid thing he can think to say. It's a what the fuck utterance, but then it's a what the fuck situation.

Sasuke freezes, then, and that's enough. That's startled admittance the Uchiha thinks Naruto's death by his hands would have given him the ultimate curse.

(_to achieve the mangekyou sharingan you need spill the life blood of an uchiha or of one loved by an uchiha_)

Naruto chokes and coughs as Sasuke's strangling hand slackens though stops short of releasing him completely, surges upward. Sasuke's other hand is trapped between them, still pressed to his heart but without any energy behind it now but a frenzied pulse.

"You can make or break me, you know," Naruto admits on an exhalation that is almost a laugh, from humiliation and fear and – yeah, love.

Make or break me, Naruto says, and Sasuke kisses him.

Wrong word, Naruto thinks, dimly (it's not about kissing, not in the way the term is generally meant, not even nearly).

Sasuke just inhales, and they're close enough the air he sucks in is drawn partly from Naruto's exhalations, and it's not exactly a kiss at all. Just breathing so very close together that their lips might be touching – his pulse is pounding in them, only just below the thin skin, jumpy and insistent.

So it's not the motions of a kiss but it's too intimate not to be one.

"Oh hell," Sasuke whispers, bangs falling forward to obscure his face. "Oh _fuck_ this."

He pushes himself up on weak limbs that should not support him, should not remain graceful and fast. Barely three steps away he allows himself to collapse again, sits in his own vulnerable, impossibly dignified heap on the floor, face resting in his hands, one elbow propped against his knee.

"I love you," Naruto establishes, feeling anger grow inside him. "And you love me. So what the hell is this shit? Why are we – I don't get it! I'm sorry about what I did, I am, but you have no right to start being an ass to Iruka-sensei about it! Why can't things just _make sense_?!"

He realizes he is on his way to standing up, hands fisted at his sides, when the last sentence is spat out.

Whatever Sasuke did that left his senses and responses dimmed and dull is obviously having quite an effect on him, though, for he stumbles and would have fallen if not for the wall's support.

"What the fuck did you do?"

"Shut up," Sasuke mutters. "I'm trying to – not-think."

"Sasuke," another voice calls then, and Kakashi steps hurriedly into the apartment. "Oh lord."

Instead of doing any of the things Naruto would have expected (rushing to sasuke's side, yelling at naruto, checking on iruka-sensei) Kakashi sticks his head through the doorway into the next room.

Then, under Naruto's blank stare, he returns to crouch beside Iruka-sensei.

"He's fine," Sasuke interjects, irritated and impatient.

"Good," Kakashi remarks non-committally, not pausing in his brief examination, which is conducted with the kind of perfect efficiently that announces Kakashi has checked comrades for wounds many times before and is not expecting good news.

"What were you doing?" Naruto asks at last, can't help asking into the weird surreal atmosphere.

Kakashi's eyes are closed over the content arc of that irrepressible little smile. "I made sure my porn collection is undamaged."

Naruto continues staring at him before closing his eyes briefly in renewed pain, one hand pressed to his stomach. Personal outrage and hypocritical disgust war with the freeing impulse to throw back his head and laugh all this madness away.

Only, he fears he might end up sobbing instead so stays quiet.

Iruka-sensei stirs, and Kakashi bends to get a good grip, hefting the limp form.

"Perhaps you and I should take him to the hospital, Naruto, just to be on the safe side."

"He stays," ring out Sasuke's decisive tones, though his posture is still slumped.

"I stay," Naruto confirms, with eyes for nothing now but that bowed black head.

"Mind the porn," Kakashi warns in exasperation and brings Iruka-sensei with him out.

Leaving them alone again, and Naruto is still leaning against the wall and wanting to force his way to Sasuke when the Uchiha looks up at him at last, with eyes that are unmistakably yellow even when shadowed like this.

"I sealed the Kyuubi," he announces, words clipped and dry. "Completely, for a few days at least."

"I might have agreed to let you if you'd _asked_," Naruto sneers through a world tilting from shock. Jiraiya needed never tell him it was irrevocable, the curse that has hunted him all his days (_this is not supposed to be possible_).

"You're wrong," Sasuke tells him forcefully. "I don't love you." His fingers spasm. "There's no such thing as love."

"Yes there is you stupid bastard. You think I'd have stayed around for anything less? You're not exactly model company." He exhales slowly, eyes closed on anger and ache. "I'm not going away. What – what do you want from me?"

Sasuke tilts his head thoughtfully to the side. Eventually he says, muted intensity in every line of him: "Everything or nothing."

Before Naruto has thought to respond, before Naruto is aware of the sentence being finished, Sasuke is across the room, conquering his personal space with superior nonchalance.

"I don't love you," Sasuke insists in a chill breath into his ear. "I just – want you around. Need you."

Naruto has the idea that last was not at all what Sasuke intended to say, if the mortified way he stiffens, as though trying to gulp the words back down, is anything to go by.

(it doesn't matter)

"Stop fucking trying to kill me, then," he wheezes, grabbing Sasuke's hips around the pain. His fingers knot in the bones and hollows, there's naked skin against his right palm because the shirt Sasuke slugs around in is pretty flimsy and has torn.

He has no doubt it hurts, but that's never mattered before, so it's a shock to him when Sasuke flinches violently.

Pale piss-colored eyes rise to meet his at last, and Sasuke orders, frail, "You are in no position to be taking liberties with my person."

"Alright," Naruto says after a moment of being frozen to the core: _this is what I did, this is what he'll do to me, and I suppose we've both deserved it_. Slackens the grip, until his hands are just laying there, not even pressure, just warmth, presence. Sasuke's breathing rather hard under them, leaning almost imperceptibly closer to him, and Naruto's arms stretch to encircle him completely, fingers skittering up the spine – and he remembers how it broke, remembers the particular crunching sound, but it's whole now, it's whole, it was healed, and surely that must mean we can be too…?

Another shudder of pain wracks him, Kyuubi clawing impotently but furiously at the new seal, and his head falls forward. Maybe he meant to press his forehead to Sasuke's or something, but he ends up catching Sasuke's mouth. That doesn't seem a bad option either, so Naruto doesn't move, moans and bites again from the hurt, and this time he moans into Sasuke's mouth, bites lightly at Sasuke's lip.

For a moment only Sasuke returns his affections. Different, though, Naruto thinks dimly, very different from any other kiss Sasuke's ever given him. This is slower, more careful, more tongue, as though Sasuke's exploring the crevices inside Naruto's mouth entirely anew, evaluating a previously unknown phenomenon.

"Stop trying to kill me," Sasuke whimpers, and Naruto remembers all too well Sasuke's body in his arms, the lax weight and the guilt, in Country of the Wave when the world ended (i could never want that).

Crushes Sasuke to him harder, and Sasuke's hands are rough on him despite their tentativeness, the kind of frustrated clutching that means an absolute immediate need for skin.

Next second Sasuke's hands are on his face, covering the whisker-scars, bashing his head into the wall.

"Hey!" Naruto protests from behind the ringing in his ears and the darkened blurriness of his vision. "You sealed Kyuubi! Even if I tried I couldn't–"

"Why yes I did," Sasuke interrupts him, oily and icy. "Let us see what that entails."

And his fist meets Naruto's temple.

He's mimicking it, Naruto does realize, mimicking something that took place outside a shitty roadside inn late one morning when the birds stopped singing.

Except Naruto didn't walk with calm briskness to his fallen teammate to stand considering over him, a horrible vision of lethal beauty smeared over pointed childish features, one foot planted firm on either side of the lying body, expression a little sick and very elated.

And having Kyuubi sealed seems to mean Naruto can't get up, crashes four times before he manages to level himself up on a shaky elbow, and god. It this what it's like to be normal? This palpable helplessness, this inability to make a difference or protect, is this what it means not to be cursed?

Sasuke bends, and the movement is such and Naruto's emptied eyes are such that Naruto can hardly follow the move.

He becomes starkly aware of it when Sasuke grabs his collar and lifts his torso off the floor, though.

"Sasuke," comes a warning then, first his own croak that means: _you don't want to do this._

Then again, and because the word is like a whiplash, without warmth or irony or indolence, it takes moments before Naruto realizes it's Kakashi who has returned to speak it.

Sasuke drops him without thought: he barely manages to catch himself in time to avoid major head trauma.

It's the first time in years he has seen Kakashi truly serious, shoulders loosening, chakra tightening.

Sasuke quirks an eyebrow, not making a move, but Naruto can see he too is firming his grip on the situation.

"What about minding your precious collection?" he asks lazily, but his eyes are alert. "It might get hurt."

"There are more important things. You're going too far. Step away from Naruto."

So this is what it's like to be normal, then? To be protected. To be cared for. Because you can't protect, can't care for. To be part of the community because you are too weak to stand on your own.

_I need Kyuubi back._

A hysterical sentiment, but certain as mountains.

_In comparison to what really matters, I couldn't care less about this village._

He wants Leaf – he needs Sasuke. It's really pretty simple, when you get down to it, and he's tired of giving a damn about people who have scorned him all the days of his life – pointing fingers, rotten eggs thrown at him, the unfamiliar fists, unfamiliar men pushing him into a wall, husking: "You're not welcome here" and the pain that followed. Always the pain, sharp and intimate.

_I don't need you, anymore._

(did he ever?)

"Kakashi," he hisses, hoarse, forcing himself up at last. Unsteady and by degrees and only at the mercy of the wall to hold on to, but he's standing. Halfway so, at least. "Stay out of it. Sasuke. Undo it."

Sasuke's face lights up with the challenge, a smirk curving his mouth, and yes, this is so much the old Sasuke…

"There is no way," Kakashi interjects flatly. "You are both coming with me to see the Hokage right now."

Incredibly, stunningly, gratifyingly, Sasuke returns to him before they leave, slinging one of Naruto's arms over his shoulders and fitting one of his own around Naruto's waist.

(apparently it's alright for kakashi both to openly challenge sasuke without getting a defiant response and to touch him, a casual hand brushing across the uchiha's free shoulder as they start wobbling down the staircase)

When at long length they reach ground level, step out of the shady building into the golden afternoon sunlight, Naruto determines he can walk by himself and tugs gently loose.

Everyone they pass stare hatred at him, reverence at Sasuke. Naruto could laugh at the irony, had he not been so dangerously close to tears at the thought – he's tried all his life to please this village, be worthy of its acknowledgement, and on him they bestow screamed insults and raised fists, thrown projectiles both sharp and rotten. Sasuke has never made a secret of the fact he considers them beneath him, beneath his care and even notice, and from his glare they shrink, bowing in fear and worship.

(it is when sasuke sidesteps one of the projectiles and pauses to give the thrower a long, level red stare that the physical insults stop coming)

Kakashi says nothing all the while, merely catches stones and stinking fruit, dropping them uselessly on the ground. One or two he returns, smiling in mock apology at the enraged commoners wiping waste off their faces.

Reaching the Hokage Tower is a relief, the cold echoing halls lying chilling and protective all around them.

"A moment," Kakashi mutters, slinking into Tsunade's office and closing the door behind him, leaving Naruto and Sasuke standing in the corridor like schoolchildren waiting on their teacher.

Except Sasuke, with that insufferably superior air, that self-satisfied tilt to his chin, does not look a schoolchild.

Nor does Naruto feel like one, finally over the pangs from the new Kyuubi-seal but not the ones from deeper causes.

He is weak and feeble like a newborn kitten when the group of Chuunin rounds the corner, eyebrows rising and smirks twisting at the sight of him and Sasuke.

They approach with purpose in their steps all of a sudden, and Naruto becomes abruptly conscious of the fact Sasuke and he are standing two or three meters apart, that Sasuke isn't bothering to turn more than a dismissive, indolent gaze on the strangers.

Naruto isn't sure what exactly makes him tense and ready, but when the first punch comes he's glad for the adrenaline aiding his clumsy duck: he could not quite have expected.

But why yes, it seems it was indeed only Sasuke's immediate presence and earlier obvious disapproval that stopped anyone from attacking him.

"Fucking freak beast," one of them sneers.

"Demon brat," another adds.

"Look," Naruto tries, evading and assessing them. Six men, all adult. "Why are you…?"

He's answered by a hit on the mouth – almost freezes, stumbling backwards, because hey, come on, six Chuunin? Should be nothing, barely an annoyance, to one who's fought Gaara's of the Desert demons, who has survived Orochimaru and Sasuke.

He goes through the seals even as he falls, catches himself before he hits the ground, but they're on him already and right now there's no time for the Kage Bunshin no Jutsu.

It leaves a sour taste in his mouth to realize without any mercy of doubt how much he has relied on Kyuubi, that they are able to overpower him now whom he would have fully expected to dismiss with a laugh only hours earlier. He could take two Chuunin, maybe three – with twice that number things get ugly.

There's a foot in his stomach, right over the reformed seal, and doubling over involuntarily he sees and knows he won't have time to avoid the knee rising to connect with his face, closes his eyes and steels himself for the inevitable agony of crushed features.

Except it never comes.

"Hey," Sasuke calls, a low simple sound that would not have compelled everyone's full attention had it not been for the fact it is spoken by the village's famed savior (of course, sasuke's voice had that quality before he'd even graduated the academy, so then again maybe it would).

Sasuke, who is now staring them down with the Mangekyou Sharingan.

No one moves as the Uchiha liberates the hand closed around a fistful of Naruto's jacket, letting Naruto stumble ungracefully upright and a step or two back. Sasuke's touching the limb as though it were something utterly filthy even as he consideringly breaks every one of its fingers, one after the other with this terrible unstoppable efficiency.

It is as though it were the only sound course of action, as though it were not even a possibility for him to do otherwise.

The noise the man makes is what Naruto imagines would sound if someone bit their tongue almost clean through on a scream.

Still no one moves in the silence as Sasuke drops the stranger's arm and instead laces his fingers through Naruto's, not much looking at him but holding his hand rather ostensibly, huffy but...posessive? Protective? Perhaps.

They back away in silence, after that, the Chuunin, uncomfortable and at a loss – it is obvious enough it is hard to decide whether Sasuke's approval or Naruto's demon weighs most heavily in the balance in their puny little minds, whether the odd liaison should damn Sasuke or redeem Naruto.

Naruto has woken up, woken away from his dreams and into reality. Sasuke woke him up, where others' hatred and scornful betrayal could only make him stir vaguely.

He stares at Sasuke's profile now, because this is what matters and this is the dream in reality, and has the idea Sasuke would have come off as pale, had his normal pallor not been such that he isn't likely to get any whither this side of death. Focuses completely on Sasuke until the force of his stare has Sasuke focusing completely on him, however reluctantly.

Leagues of emptiness seem to lie between Naruto and the curling raging humiliation, and love is simple as pain, basic as hunger.

Fingers curled decisively around Sasuke's, he can say, shaky, with a faint shadow of a grin, "It's sweet of you to look out for me."

Sasuke snorts, frees his hand to examine the bruise swelling purple in Naruto's face, forming quick seals and reaching up to press healing hands to the ugly mark. Naruto submits to the treatment though notes, bemused and befuddled, that Sasuke doesn't touch any of the violence-marks _he_ left on him.

(_obviously_ that's different, huh?)

Considerably more than a moment after he went in through it, Kakashi nudges the door open and pokes his head out, nodding at them to enter.

_She tried_, Naruto reminds himself, staring with apathy at the Hokage. _She trusted me with everything that mattered most, to her if not to me._

It doesn't seem to be enough to shake his new hard-won conclusions about the bleak world he's somehow been surviving in without knowing.

"Uchiha," Tsunade says, and there's a strain like choking to her voice. An old voice, suddenly, and Naruto abruptly suspects Sasuke doesn't see the big-breasted blond babe but the old, withered and embittered hag clinging to the illusion. "I understand you've been less than stabile following the latest… incident."

"I'm fine," Sasuke says curtly, a grim indication of a smirk at the corner of his mouth as Tsunade's face falls from meeting the golden eyes.

"Fine enough for missions?" she asks archly.

"Sure," Sasuke says shortly, hinting at a shrug he doesn't actually perform. Adds, rather blandly, rather coldly, "I want one with killing."

"I'll go with you," Naruto says, words clear and almost irrefutable with conviction. He's still only looking at Sasuke.

Tsunade massages her temples. "I'm not – what about the Kyuubi?"

(because obviously it would be nothing but a fool's naivety to doubt sasuke knows all about that, the demon god and its imprisonment)

"Sasuke sealed it," Naruto says tightly. "Completely." He turns back to Sasuke and repeats: "Undo it."

"Naruto!" Tsunade's voice can go surprisingly high.

"No," Sasuke says blankly. "I won't go fight both the Akatsuki and the Kyuubi."

"I need you to trust me," Naruto exclaims. "You have no right to decide about my life, and this isn't working. It's like being – crippled!"

"Do you _want_ Kyuubi?" Tsunade explodes.

"After the mission," Naruto haggles with Sasuke. "You can undo it right after the mission."

Sasuke's eyes darken with something like challenge, like anticipation, like need under raised brows. "Fair enough."

"Great," Naruto decides with more force than gladness. "We're going, then."

"Wait," Tsunade cautions, though it is quite clear the fight has gone out of her. With the Akatsuki and their allies close enough to be picking off returning ANBU teams, Naruto assumes she has reasons she can't afford to argue with her own. "Aside from the fact I haven't approved giving the two of you an A-rank, there's the matter of Mitarashi Anko."

What? Naruto thinks. I thought she was fine. Iruka-sensei said most of her team died, but she pulled through.

"Shizune told me you unlocked her seal," Tsunade says to Sasuke, carefully inflectionless. "Kakashi has re-sealed it, but like the restrainer he placed on you years ago, it is far from a completed process. I suspect you can fully undo the original curse mark, however."

"That's impossible," Sasuke replies, and Naruto is vaguely shocked. Sasuke admitting to being unable to accomplish something? The sky must be about to fall. "She doesn't want it to disappear."

Tsunade's face is suddenly a lot less pleasant. "It's hunted her all her life," she says harshly. "Of course she'd rejoice at being set free."

Condescension laces Sasuke's voice as he rejects this interpretation. "She's had it all her life, indeed. If it disappeared, so would she. She's had it for so long she's nothing without it." There's a smile now, and Sasuke doesn't smile, thus needless to say it isn't his. A smile sweet as rotting fruit. "She loved him, you know," he confides. "Like people always love the ones who make them necessary. Like you love Nawaki and Dan."

These are dangerous waters, Naruto is aware.

He half expects Tsunade to explode, but instead she too goes for the low blows, vicious as venom and just as smooth. "Like you love Naruto, then?"

(she should have known this is one arena in which no one stands a chance against sasuke)

"Do you think there is in me to love? I spent an adolescence with you and never loved you – you should know."

Naruto grabs his arm at that, fingers hard around Sasuke's elbow, palm slick with sweat against Sasuke's skin, almost felt through the thin fabric.

"You're not him."

Even though Naruto is keenly aware that the Uchiha Sasuke he used to know would certainly not have walked through the village in a flimsy over-large shirt with its hem ending just a little past halfway down his thighs and not much else (something as simple as that, so irrefutable and revealing).

"True," Sasuke nevertheless admits, looking at him at last, and Naruto can relax his immediate anxiety though not his hold.

"Alright," Tsunade sneers. "Fine. Take the mission. And now get out!"

It is quickly decided they will all stay with Kakashi for the immediate future.

"Let's go," Kakashi says at once, a hand light on Sasuke's shoulder before Sasuke's face-freeze of impassive dislike removes it. "Perhaps you'd like to come too, Naruto? I've gotten used to sleeping in the kitchen."

Tactfully put, that casual kind assurance that though Sasuke has been staying with him he hasn't been living with him.

Naruto feels something that is almost the old warmth as he nods, still clinging to Sasuke's arm. Him Sasuke allows.

Mollified, he grudgingly allows himself to ask Kakashi, "How's Iruka-sensei?"

"He's in no danger," Kakashi reports. "Shocked and left with a few new scars, but he'll be up and about by tomorrow."

"Good." For Iruka-sensei has done so much through so little, and really Naruto should not be holding hands with the person who landed him in the hospital, palm against palm, except Iruka-sensei was never important enough for _should_ to seem to matter anymore.

Up the staircase again, and from the cramped hallway into the kitchen where Iruka-sensei's blood stains the floor.

Sasuke is feeling better now, in so far as milder and calmer equals better. The dizzyingly spinning thoughts have died down to become a mere buzz, their sharp edges blunted by overtiredness. The dark redness remains at a distance.

"Right," Kakashi says, laying the scroll detailing the mission on the kitchen table and cutting off the ribbon tying it closed. "Huh, look at that. Seems you'll be hunting Mist ninja in the borderlands. Assassinate a prospective sub-chief, take down as many of his minions as practically possible in the process."

"What's really going on?" Sasuke asks, listlessly though intently, dropping down on one of the ratty chairs.

"Yeah," Naruto agrees, in that new way where his eyes are dulled and his voice sharp, he too sitting down. "With Team Anko attacked so close to the village?"

Kakashi's shrug is light, elegant, absolutely at odds with his scruffy, translucent appearance. "War," he says. "The Hidden Village of Sound broke apart when Orochimaru was dispatched, now the survivors are spreading unrest as they search out new territory and new prey. The Akatsuki don't appear to be idle, either." He sighs, shrugs again. "At this rate, very shortly, it will be Leaf and Sand against the rest of the ninja world, and Sand's busy with their civil unrest."

"Civil unrest?" Sasuke repeats. "In Sand?"

Yeah, Naruto thinks. Right. He hasn't heard.

Hasn't heard about Gaara with his empty eyes treading the fine line between savior and monster. About a Sand Village so terrified by Orochimaru's manipulation of their leader they have neglected to choose a new Kazekage and is governed instead by a council of elders and generals, who cannot seem to decide which course to take, regarding training programs or constructed monsters or much of anything at all.

"They've managed to stave off civil war this far," Kakashi says. "This outside threat will either unite them or throw them completely into chaos."

Sasuke nods shortly though there is still a faint cast of surprise to his features.

"They'll unite," Naruto says. "Gaara won't allow anything else."

"If they unite," Sasuke says cruelly, "it's more likely than not that it'll be against Gaara."

"That's not true!"

Sasuke's smile is lazy and wide and vicious. "Is there any one emotion that every single inhabitant of Leaf shares but absolute abhorrence of the Kyuubi?"

"That's not true," Naruto repeats, upright and slamming his fists on the table. He's calm when he continues, though, the calm that comes with conviction. "You don't hate me. There are several people who don't hate me. And I don't think you hate Kyuubi either."

"Ah," says Sasuke, and his voice is the moon, distant and beautiful and fickle. "But I am not of this village."

xxxxxxxxxx


	24. Never one of You

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 24:**

"**Never One of You"**

_But I am not of this village_, Sasuke has said, and the lightly uttered sentence has the heavy ring of irrefutable truth. Sasuke has not been of Leaf since he left, more than three years ago, and the ninja world is not forgiving nor forgetting in nature.

"If I were," he continues, staring straight into Naruto's eyes but sounding as though he were examining his nails, "I would doubtless have been upset about the deaths of my clansmen brought about by the Fox Demon, all the Uchiha blood it spilled."

He smiles a rich nasty smile.

"But that's just it. I'm not. They were fools to go against a being such as the Nine Tails."

"It would seem," Kakashi points out mildly, "a rather good tactic for a man concerned about his clan's survival to strive to protect the next generation."

"Perhaps," Sasuke concedes, lacing pale fingers under his chin. "But they should have sealed it from the start. My kin, indeed all the fighting ninja, were mere distractions – a meat shield, if you will. It is not possible to defeat a demon god, not in any circumstances, not ever."

"But the Fourth sealed it," Naruto argues, calm now, absolutely calm. Cold rising in him. Feverish cold, ants crawling along the inside of his skin. "Surely that's as good as defeating it."

"It is – a temporary human measure against an entity too grand to be understood in human terms, a measure bought with blood sacrifice from the same source Kyuubi originates from, same as the Mangekyou. Nothing more."

His smile is thin now, with the prettiness of a blade.

"All those dead – all those men and women the Fourth sent out. He knew they hadn't a chance of survival, he must have. That was the point. Their forfeited lives and his own paid the price of the sealing jutsu."

"But the Fourth was a hero!" Naruto cries, almost screeches. What he carries within him (indeed, what he wants back) is a hundred people's blood.

"Well," Sasuke says mildly, scorn twisting his face. "I never said he didn't save your precious village." He tilts his face minutely towards Kakashi, impassive as ever, one eyebrow delicately lifted. "Am I wrong?"

"No," says Kakashi (who knew the fourth as a man too good for this world, but a man all the same) with a small smile containing all the melancholia of all the lost years.

Naruto sits down again, curious now more than anything despite the solemn grief, speaking guarded and frank: "What's that source you talked about? That the Kyuubi and the Mangekyou come from?"

"Orochimaru told me a story," Sasuke confides languidly. "One I realized I'd heard already, when Itachi was trying to bore me to sleep." The twitch of his face is so brief it hardly has time to appear before it is gone. He might as well have said: my mother told me. His first mother. "This tale claims that once, before time, there was a world – as we know it and yet not. It was a world of perfect structure, perfect happiness, where gods walked among the mortals paying homage to their Lord Creator. Nothing could ever go wrong, because everything was determined, preordained.

"At length, however, the Creator tired of this, and decidedly he had rather the mortals could choose right and wrong, happiness and unhappiness, for themselves. It was then that he crafted the Tailed Demon Gods, which were created wild and impossible for even him to control, made with and for the single purpose of being wild.

"They left nothing structured intact, and the Creator retired to the far side of the stars, and the lesser gods started eventually to breed with humans, for they were growing extinct, too locked in the old order of the world.

"All that remains now are the Tailed Demon Gods, carriers, indeed personifications of a sort, of that old miasma of power to be bought and sold for blood and heart's will to sacrifice, and the descendants of the gods – the bearers of gifts that can never be imitated, that can never be submitted to sacrilege because one must be born into them.

"And it is said," and there is that smile again, so sweet, so content, yet with that edge of loathing, of shame, directed at least partly inwards, "that if you are such a one, such a descendant of what were once gods, a carrier of a Bloodline Limit – it is said that if your heart is strong enough for you to cut it out in exchange, that you can gain a grain of that power, tap into the original source of olden gods and the magic in their blood."

Power that, like the conditions surrounding it, is absolute. Power beyond human comprehension (power like the mangekyou, and the smile of the kyuubi, and the creature whispering lullabies to gaara far out in the desert).

Naruto feels the seal on his stomach heat in a phantom burn, avoids clutching at it by holding on to the edge of the table. Sasuke's eyes have gone red, probably subconsciously, glaring Mangekyou at him.

"If the Mangekyou's really so great," he says, "then how did you defeat Itachi? I mean, he had it, right, and you didn't get yours until you'd already done it."

"I don't believe that's any business of yours," Sasuke says caustically.

"Then you're wrong," Naruto counters, "which on the other hand would be nothing new."

If peace between them were not still brittle Sasuke would have lashed out.

"Fine," he says instead, lips pinched unpleasantly. "I appealed to what was still human in him."

"What's that? You told him he'd been a bad boy and you'd really feel much better if he'd let you kill him?"

"Not…exactly." And this is where the line is drawn. Another word on the subject and it won't matter how well their hands fit together, interlaced during the walk through the village. Won't matter how Sasuke promised to release Kyuubi after the mission (that implication of trust).

"I think chicken will make for an excellent dinner," Kakashi remarks blandly, effectively diminishing the mounting tension. Naruto has the inkling he wasn't the only one who'd forgotten the man's (no doubt intentionally) discreet presence.

"I'll help," Naruto offers, and Sasuke is measuring rice into a pot while Kakashi smiles the smile of one blissfully unaware of the dangers of letting Naruto loose in a kitchen.

In a matter of minutes they are all making dinner together like some kind of family. For the first little while it's curiously pleasant, the relaxed catastrophes of Naruto's mistakes, the nervous laugher and easy remarks. Soon enough, however, it grows ridiculous (like the tension).

What the hell is this? You don't go from – _what has happened_ – to this mundane stupidity. It's too much like loss, this painful play-act ignorance of everything that's vibrating between them.

He lets his hand brush Naruto's, tanned fingers fisted around the handle of a knife chopping chicken so that pale flesh flies all over the sink, and there it is (the truth?). A locked gaze and he is anchored in the present again, and things are immediate and meaningful and hurt.

They haven't been for some time, and restful as that is Sasuke is growing very tired of the boredom it entails.

Dinner is eaten quietly and fast, Naruto squirming uncomfortably as Sasuke stares into empty space and Kakashi pretend-relaxes with his beloved book until he actually is relaxed, dishes put away as though the task were a mission.

He turns from the finished washing, and Naruto is standing inappropriately close, drying something with a very dirty towel. It is dropped fast when Sasuke tugs him that little bit closer with a slow, deliberate motion, pulls him close enough that his breasts are pressed flat against Naruto's leaner chest, twining his arms around Naruto's neck, and this is the fire burned children run from and dream of and can't forget or forgo; the right fit of Naruto's lips on his, and yes, yes, this is the deadliness that makes survival life.

Naruto's mouth opens startled and gratified over his, rough hands lift to his hips, a hard body pressing Sasuke between itself and the unforgiving edges of the counter.

Sasuke presses a palm firmly against the back of Naruto's head, presses Naruto's mouth practically into his own, kisses him with something approaching the frantic and wants and wants.

His immediate urge was to fight, to go through the ritualized vital motions of life and death with Naruto, but this is not a bad alternative.

Naruto's hand climbs his ribs, sneaks in between them to latch onto his breast; and Kakashi says, "Bedroom's over there, you know."

They might as well go, it's probably more practical and everything. Hand in hand again, Naruto calling out an embarrassed goodnight and Sasuke a composed one, and Naruto kicks the door shut behind them and is laying Sasuke down across the bed before it has quite closed.

It's good for a while, though very hasty, Naruto freeing flesh from cloth while Sasuke tries more sedately to reacquaint himself with touches that were once more familiar than his own face. Then it is too much too fast after all, panic growing rapid and choking: (_this is altogether too much like…!_)

"Don't," he says, and Naruto stops, looks up from his occupation with Sasuke's collarbone and removes his hands from inside the unbuttoned shirt.

"What's wrong?"

Sasuke's hands, lax for some small amount of time, are still on him.

"Does it make you feel powerful?" he asks. "The idea of fucking me."

"Actually," Naruto says, dead-pan, "call me weird, but if you want the truth it mostly makes me feel horny."

Sasuke carefully does not think about panting from panic more than from pleasure, though being unable to deny there is pleasure where Naruto's physicality presses into his, of how every spark of it makes the panic stronger, uglier.

He smirk-grins at the words, a little, and rolls over onto his side, his back against Naruto's chest. "I don't want to."

"Okay. But, um, you don't mind if I – hold on, right?"

His retort is rude but affirmative and he twitches until he is comfortable with Naruto curled around his back. It's alright because Naruto's distress is so obviously unfakeable. Unmistakable, like the way certain things have changed that Sasuke should be glad for but isn't sure he is.

God, he can't have wanted Naruto to live in a stupid dream world.

No, he didn't. But he knows it's a rough awakening and Naruto is – different.

"I slept under the bed once," Naruto mumbles, the words pouring into Sasuke's neck, just below his ear, and he twitches again. He'd think this mockery, if Naruto were capable of that. The fact he isn't leaves only sympathy, sharing. Sasuke twitches more but doesn't move away. "When I was a kid and hiding from Kyuubi and the people who hated me. It was strange but it felt, like, felt safe."

(yes, sasuke remembers the comfort of being stupidly, childishly certain itachi wouldn't be able to find him under the bed if he chanced to come home to finish the job by killing sasuke as well)

"Shut up," Sasuke mutters. "What time is it anyway?"

"You shut up," Naruto mutters back, tightening the arm wrapped around Sasuke's chest, just below his breasts. "Bedtime."

"For you, maybe." He struggles loose. It's not hard – after the first reflexive clutching Naruto obediently lets go. Sasuke slips away to sit at the window, watching the moon rise and Naruto sleep.

xxxxx

Sasuke's still sitting at the window, seemingly sleeping, when Naruto wakes the following morning

More specifically, he wakes to Kakashi's voice calling through the door, "Get up and out here, you two! No fighting in the room with the porn!"

Naruto almost smiles at that, pushing thick and surprisingly comfortable blankets away and swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. Adjusting his pants and picking up his shirt on the way he sneaks over to Sasuke, who has yet to open his eyes.

Black hair falls over a white face bathed in morning sunlight, and Naruto holds his breath, hovering close. Remains so when Sasuke opens his eyes and offers a miffed, sleepy expression that would be gruff and unfriendly on anyone else but counts as a smile when on Sasuke's features (pretty sad standards, actually, those).

"Morning," Naruto whispers, and doesn't want to help bending a little bit.

Sasuke's mouth is soft, head angled back to meet Naruto's, and they kiss in the brightness as if they were the star-crossed lovers of a stupid romance. It's … sweet, this interlude without overtones of sex or violence, mouths tasting funny from sleep, so alien to what we have.

Except he's grown up now, snapped out of childhood hazes, and know that yes, it is _like_ this was an uncomplicated romance.

It isn't, of course.

_(this is real)_

Real enough the cutesy exchange is ended by his bladder reminding him it's been full for some time.

Sasuke laughs; when Naruto has done his business and woken himself up properly with a splash of cold water in the face, the Uchiha has slipped into the kitchen, some kind of sweater that, judging by its size, is probably Kakashi's over the ruined shirt.

Their former teacher looks strikingly alert for a man who's kipped on kitchen chairs for about a week, but the strong smells of coffee and cigarette ashes might have something to do with that.

What's offered is tea with milk and some rice, though, Naruto eagerly gulping down his part (all the years spent yearning for the home cooking the other kids had, when the stench of ramen he had not yet learned to appreciate clung perpetually to his clothes and hair), Sasuke shoveling food into his mouth with more decisiveness than appetite as per usual.

"When will you start showing?" Naruto blurts. Elaborates, at the raised eyebrows, Sasuke's in annoyance and Kakashi's in amusement, "Well, you are going to have a baby. Shouldn't you be getting, you know, huge?"

"I'm only a month along," Sasuke says, sounding pretty bad-tempered (pause, because memory is disoriented and at a loss). "Exactly how long does a pregnancy last anyway?"

"Nine months, I believe," Kakashi says in the mild, content voice that announces he's having fun at someone else's expense.

"Nine months?" Sasuke repeats in astonished horror. "You can't be serious. That's – preposterous. No woman would willingly suffer through this for nine months!"

"You might have wanted to investigate the time aspect a tad bit more thoroughly before conception," Kakashi says, swallowing a laugh. "Surely someone must have mentioned the normal span of a pregnancy."

"Well," Sasuke admits. "Yes. I suppose. They should've been joking."

"Well," Naruto repeats. "At least you aren't sick from it anymore."

Sasuke snorts and looks exceptionally tempted to throw his rice bowl at him.

"Now, now," Kakashi interrupts. "No fighting at meal times. When were you planning to leave for your mission? I'm certain Tsunade will be anxious to have you back in time for the upcoming Jounin Exam."

"Oh," Naruto finds himself saying. "Right. That. I'd forgotten."

Sasuke offers a sardonic twist of his mouth, in clear sharing.

"Can you scrounge up anyone who'd be willing to fight me for it?" he asks.

Kakashi shrugs, a fluid movement that dislocates the neckline of his shirt enough that it becomes plain Sasuke isn't the only one who should be gaining. "I expect Gai will have to step in if everyone else refuses."

"Of course," Sasuke agrees. "Hm. I suppose we might as well leave today."

"I want to see Iruka-sensei first," Naruto interjects. "And Sakura-chan."

"You do that," says Sasuke, only marginally tenser. "I'll pick up our stuff."

xxxxx

"See?" Ino says, flicking pale-gold hair over her shoulder with a movement made none the less flirtatious or alluring for the obvious practice behind it. "I think it's growing out nicely. I really should have stopped tying it back long ago."

"Weren't you going to keep it short?" Sakura asks indulgently, washing her hands after the latest examination. Ino's not really supposed to be in these parts of the hospital now she's discharged, but it's not as though they're disturbing anyone. "I thought you considered long hair a nuisance to the dedicated ninja."

"I think that might be true, actually, on a certain level," Ino concedes, only to immediately become enthused again: "But look at all the really excellent shinobi – all the Sannin, most of the Hyuuga. They kick ass!"

In the interest of many things (not least of which her own peace of mind) Sakura refrains from mentioning that Ino is not an exceptional ninja and will likely never be one.

"I heard Hanabi cut hers, actually," she says instead.

"Really? When?"

"Hinata told me this morning. Apparently it's just to her chin now. Hanabi's hair, I mean."

Ino grins and preens. "Guess she was just so impressed by me."

"Ino…"

"I know, I know," Ino says, holding her hands up as though warding off reprimands. "She kicked my ass into the hospital during her first try at the Chuunin Exam. Which of course she passed even though she's barely ten and I've retaken it three times, and she's supposedly going to appear in the Jounin Trials too. You know, the ones that were postponed because of the mess your boyfriends made."

"Neither one of them is my boyfriend," Sakura protests automatically, rather more acrimoniously than usual. "Anyway, I'm worried. Things must be looking grave if the Hokage postpones the exam just so Sasuke and Naruto can pass it, and letting Hanabi enter…"

"Yeah," Ino agrees. "What's up with that? I mean, sure, Bloodline prodigy, sure, but she's a kid. You know?"

"Now she's passed the Chuunin Exam she's a legal adult," Sakura reminds the both of them. "And since Hinata's finally pregnant the Hyuuga Clan already has an heir on the way, so there was really no excuse left to refuse."

"Huh," Ino says. "With Neji. Isn't that kind of, well, incest? They are first cousins, and their fathers were _twins_."

Sakura would really rather not talk about incestuous children, thank you very much.

She shrugs, voice growing short and snappish. "Evidently that's not considered a problem. Look at Hanabi, she's inbred enough her Byakugan looks strange, and she's the new star of the clan."

xxxxx

Naruto is not happy, walking through the still disorienting white-washed corridors. Not unhappy either, though.

The disappointment was too expected for that, the way his talk with Iruka-sensei mostly consisted of:

"I'm sorry – no I'm not, but I know I should be. I'm sorry I'm not sorry, if that makes sense. I'm grateful, really, for everything you've done for me, but Sasuke's – Sasuke, and that's, that's not negotiable."

"I just… I love him, you know."

"You don't understand."

And of course Iruka-sensei doesn't, and that shouldn't be okay.

Truly, the only unexpected part was Iruka-sensei's: "Alright. Look, I'm not happy about this, and as I told him I don't think – I think you deserve better. But. As long as you're sure this is what you want. Why don't the two of you come by after the Jounin Exam and I'll treat you to a celebratory dinner?"

Naruto is busily trying to come up with something he can bribe Sasuke with so he behaves while they're there. This far he hasn't been all that successful.

Eventually, rather to his surprise, he runs into Hyuuga Hinata.

"Hinata!" he calls, and she turns, and she'll still that cute mousy little girl. "You're not hurt, are you?"

"Naruto." She smiles warily, blushing. "No, thank you for asking. I was just here to let Sakura-san confirm I'm really pregnant."

"You are? That's great! Congrats."

(a kind of humble miracle, among all the dying and all the killers)

"You think?" Although the words are hesitant she looks a good deal happier. "Would you… would you like to feel it?"

He nods, gladly letting her fine white hands press his gangly, rough-skinned one to her stomach. And this is what Sasuke never allows me, this soft feeling of defenseless chakra growing into its life hidden deep inside its mother's body.

Her hand goes to his temple, fingertips flicking lightly against the impressive bruise.

"What happened to you?"

"Ah," he says, uncertain and dismissive because this is not her business, lifting his touch away from her unborn baby. "Sasuke and I had an argument. Nothing serious. How are things with you? With Neji and everything?"

"It is fine," she says. "It is what I have been made to expect since it was clear it would be my chosen husband and not I who is to inherit the clan's future."

"He's not – mean?"

"No," she says softly, and he thinks there might be a hint of a smile over her face. It might just as easily be bitterness, though. "He is not – mean."

She sighs.

"He is Neji. I am Hinata. We are not – very compatible, but he does his best and I strive to make things easier on him, on us. He is away on missions most of the time. So have I been, though I shall have to quit, now I'm expecting."

"You deserve better than this." It's helpless and true. If this wasn't Hinata he'd demand to know why she is accepting this, this having her life taken away and decided for her.

She smiles thinly. "But you know what it is that I want, Naruto, and that I cannot have that. Honestly. What you want, Uchiha Sasuke, Haruno Sakura – people who are alive. How could I compare to that? I will only ever be a shadow. That is fine, though. Shadows do not often get hurt."

He is at a loss, as she bows slightly, the smile never leaving her face and never expressing an ounce of gladness.

"I shall have to excuse myself. Thank you for your concern, Naruto-san."

He could run after her, but what would he say? What is it that he can possibly say to this woman who loves him and is married to a man who loves him too and who deservers better than both of them?

Instead, after some length of dull time, he finds Sakura-chan.

He also finds Ino.

Quite simultaneously, since they appear to be kissing.

Whoa. Seems the gods have taken pity on him after the latest row of disasters and are now granting him the sight of one coveted fantasy realized at last.

Then he realizes it's real.

"Sorry!" he exclaims, face burning (remembers quite well the startled horror and astonished satisfaction when sakura-chan walked in on him and sasuke kissing for real for the first time). "I didn't mean! I didn't know!"

"That – that's alright, Naruto," Sakura-chan says, composure settling over her blush after an obvious effort, retracting her arms from around Ino, who turns to face him with a cheeky smile and a wink.

"Was there, um. Has anything happened?" Sakura-chan asks, growing clearly more anxious as she speaks. "How's Sasuke?"

"Better," Naruto can say, and mean, though it's highly debatable she'd consider him all that much healthier. "He's come out of it kicking." Literally.

"Thank god," she whispers, and for a moment her face is the face of a twelve year old girl who's innocent and in love and whom he loves. "Oh thank god."

"Yeah," Naruto says. "So, we're going away for a mission today and we'll be gone for a few days, but we'll be back in time for the Jounin Exam at the latest. I… wanted to see you before we left."

"I should hope so," she says, sounds happy. "What's the mission?" Worry returns, all the stronger for its momentary lapse. "It's an A-rank, isn't it? Oh, Naruto, it's too dangerous, he isn't stabile, I know you love him and I do too but you must see that he's not."

"I know," Naruto agrees, must agree. "I can handle it."

"Do you want me to heal you? That bruise."

"No," he says, with possibly a little too much fervor. "Leave it be."

"What really happened, that you both came back in pieces?"

"I did some unforgivable things," Naruto replies curtly, because this is Sakura-chan and she deserves the truth but the truth hurts, has the potential to cut them both so deeply they can't be fixed. "So did he. We're moving on."

"I… see," she says, and it is plain she does not. He shouldn't be so grateful for that, perhaps, or so resentful. "Careful on your way out. I – know people aren't so fond of you right now."

"Yeah," he mutters again. "Thanks."

Because with Ino waving at him like everything's normal, like they're friends, with Hinata's trustful smile and placing his hand on her unborn child, it was easy not to think about sneaking into the hospital through a window and knocking two guards unconscious to get to Iruka-sensei's room.

He's surprised to discover how little it still matters. That the village and the people in it whom he doesn't know have stopped meaning much.

He touches a hand to his stomach, fancying he can feel the muted pulse there inside through layers of clothes and seals. _Something precious and deadly that we can't do without, nor can we live with it?_

This matters, like Sasuke's absurd tale from yesterday and Sasuke himself meeting him at the village gates, impatiently throwing a bundle of weaponry and food at him.

"So," Naruto says conversationally over the sound of fast steps hitting the occasional tree branch. It's been so long since he was out like this with Sasuke, on mission or otherwise. "Iruka-sensei invited us over for dinner after we're back."

"…you cannot seriously be expecting to bring me."

"Why not?"

"Jesus," Sasuke mutters in disgust. "Here I'd fancied going out with an orphan would at least spare me the whole meeting the parents bit."

"Come on," Naruto insists. "It's just dinner. After how you cut him up, I'd say you owe him."

Sasuke snorts, a thoughtful sound, and Naruto has learned enough, at last, to drop the argument for now, shouting instead a challenge of who can reach camp ground first.

xxxxxxxxxx

**a/n: **if sasuke's tale seems familiar, it is probably because the concept has been employed rather superbly by, among others, guy gavriel kay in his _fionavar trilogy_, which i am freely admitting to, for all intents and purposes, paraphrasing on the subject.


	25. Thrill Kill

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 25:**

"**Thrill Kill"**

"Why do you care so much about him anyway?" Sasuke asks irritably when dinner's all but eaten. "From what I've gathered he's done almost nothing for you, and what he did for questionable reasons."

"He's just…" Naruto pauses in minding the bedding arrangements to give the question proper consideration. "I guess you could say Iruka-sensei is to me what Kakashi is to you. He's – not really on your level, but he understands some things, and accepts you, and it doesn't matter that you can count on him to help mostly because it makes him feel better about himself."

He offers a naked, sheepish grin.

"If that makes any sense."

"Alright," Sasuke says with ill grace. "I'll take the first watch."

"'kay," Naruto smiles, and curls up on the leaf-softened ground. Can afford to, since he's won and Sasuke's just agreed to come with him to Iruka-sensei's.

He wakes in the middle of the night from some kind of forest animal biting him, sits up incautiously with a curse. There is too much to say for any of it to be voiced – he gets up, Sasuke lies down. He keeps watch until morning.

They move fast, after that. Naruto gradually discovers what his new disposition will and will not allow – thirty replications a day seems to be his absolute limit, and he can't keep pace with Sasuke. Can't get up if Sasuke gets in a really good hit, either, nor stop him from invariably doing so. Rasengan is a laughably far away impossibility.

He's basically a good, solid Chuunin, and can only console himself he won't have to suffer these indignities (_this glaring insecurity_) for long.

Still, they leave him horribly on edge, not with fear perhaps but definitely with impotent fury, and that's always the most volatile kind.

"Why did you sleep with Kakashi?" (who has not been kakashi-_sensei_ to naruto since word of that reached him) he asks one afternoon when they've made an early stop because they're getting very close to their target.

"I wanted to be close to him," Sasuke replies steadily after a moment, not looking up from his occupation with catching fish in the river.

"You won't do it again," Naruto tells him flatly, picking himself up from the ground, fiercely tense.

"Don't tempt me to," Sasuke sneers evenly. 'You patronizing bastard' is pretty much implied. Then sharply, acceptance and attack both, "I don't much feel like sleeping with anyone."

"You're scared," Naruto says, wondering if it's a realization or a presumption. Knowing it's a challenge, though that wasn't what he wanted, not at all. Can't take it back though, because you never get anything out of Sasuke that you don't force.

"Shut the fuck up trying to pretend you understand me." Red eyes glance at him momentarily before returning to their prey.

"Sasuke…!"

"Do you really want to have this conversation?"

"I don't think want figures into it." Need does.

Sasuke's smirk is nasty and slips away fast. "Aren't you growing up."

"Yeah," Naruto replies, feels the reality of it. "I think I just might be."

"Fine, then," Sasuke says, and throws a fish at him to put in the waiting bucket. "I don't – much like talking. But alright. It's not about the sex. Everyone goes through that. Name me a real ninja who hasn't gotten fucked, roughly or for a price or because they were captured or whatever. That's – something you learn to handle. Not the problem."

Kakashi. Orochimaru. Some unnamed third. Naruto.

Sex that's domination and humiliation more than anything else. Naruto's familiar enough with that, has sucked and kneaded certain cocks he never wanted to touch. Anti-sex is every unloved kid's inheritance.

More complicated in Sasuke's case, of course, since he actually wanted Kakashi in some ways, and Orochimaru has never struck Naruto as the kind of man who'd stop at screwing merely a body when he could have a mindfuck as well. He guesses it would be more serious to actually have someone inside of you, wonders briefly what it would feel like. Shudders at the idea, when shrouded in these hated faces.

This is presumption and he knows it, but it feels like it might be right and anyway he needs to say it: "So the problem is… what? That you actually want me? That you actually like sleeping with me?"

"Oh no," Sasuke says. "I liked sleeping with Kakashi. I didn't so much like waking up with him."

"I love you," Naruto says, and they both know it's the truth, and that it might not matter very much.

xxxxx

Some few days later they have tracked down their target, and the first henchmen are there.

Sasuke starts forward like a snake, sinuous grace and sickly smirk, and Naruto grabs his wrist.

"This is an A-rank," Sasuke reminds him quite calmly. "I won't help out if you can't pull your own weight, dead-last. I am going to kill them."

"I know," Naruto says. "I wanted to say – I'm with you."

And he is. This is war, and these ninja would not show him or anyone in Leaf compassion, and he's not a child in a fairytale dreamland anymore. People die in reality, and killing is better than dying, I think.

It's easier than it was the first time. He remembers it keenly, the sick lurching feeling and white-vision that came with how his arm stretched through that nameless man's chest (only he wasn't nameless, not to his comrades, his friends, not to the people naruto had taken him away from).

He kills whomever he's able to, now, does it fast. There are very many of them.

Lightheaded and a little sick, he's eventually wrestled down after a chakra-heavy strike cut a little too close to his over-sensitized stomach.

Sasuke gives him a calculating glance but waits until the remaining clones have been rendered mere smoke before he allows himself to be captured as well.

He has a forehead protector on, for the first time in more than three years, and not the scratched one he left behind. Whole and gleaming it shows off the Leaf symbol with glaring clarity.

Rather as expected, they are brought to the leader of the band, this thick-set man they are sent to kill.

He stares at them and does not look particularly evil, after they've been led through some corridors cut out in a mountain. Or, Naruto retracts that, the man does look mean with those unfortunate pig's eyes and the heavy, scowling mouth, but not – not ostensibly so. Looks misunderstood more than anything, and quite a lot like Naruto's old landlord.

Sasuke pauses long enough to identify him, then sends chakra through his captured hands, into the man holding him, who staggers backwards with a muted scream.

So ridiculously stronger than he looks, Sasuke wastes no time ducking forward, kicking a clear space around himself.

The illusion technique that comes next hits Naruto before he has managed to completely squirm free, but he knows it for what it is from the beginning.

It's a good battle, after that – good in the sense that a spectator would regard it, probably. Intense and at least seemingly even, the two of them against perhaps forty men here inside the main cave, more pushing inwards.

The man who does not exactly look an evil overlord throws back his head and laughs.

It's perfect chaos. Genjutsu descend and are repelled, fire and electricity and great bursts of water crash through the air. Snakes explode into the middle of it all.

Naruto holds his own as best as he's able: everyone's going for Sasuke, who is rather obviously the main prize. With the aid of a few replications Naruto manages fairly well, especially after one of his foes pushes him into a corner.

The shock comes afterwards, when Sasuke is standing over the decapitated body of the enemy leader, holding the disgusting head by the hair in a dainty hand, holding it up for all to see.

The minions are dead or fleeing, after that. Most of them get eaten by the snakes.

The summons too have disappeared when Naruto's up and moving, trembling faintly and so overdosed on adrenaline he can barely see straight. Which might be just as well, because the corpses are not pretty.

Sasuke's eyes are still red, thin chest heaving with fast, shallow pants, lips lax in a strangely alight face. Not a hair out of place, but bloodstains on his hands and all the way up his arms.

Naruto recognizes the look from somewhere, gropes through uncooperative memory until the distant, chilling realization strikes him that Sasuke's aroused.

His hand is in Naruto's hair then, warm for once with wildly pounding blood, and his mouth and body pressed up against Naruto's, hard and needy and unforgiving.

"I didn't want it to be like this," Naruto husks, with Sasuke's touch on him and Sasuke's heat under his hands.

"Does want figure into it?" Sasuke breathes back with what would have been scorn, had the voice with which the sentence is spoken been a touch more arch, a smudge less intense.

Need does, naturally (need always seems to, with us).

With the reek of spilt blood in his nose and the deadness inside him and Sasuke's vivid reality in his arms, what else could there be but need?

He's terribly afraid for a moment of what they're getting into, terrified that wrongness will lace everything about them from this moment on, but instead they remedy the horror here. Make it something okay, through its connection to our holding on to each other and to a world gone mad with war.

Sasuke's body is slick with blood under his hands, for they are both smeared with it and so's the floor, so's seemingly the very air, and somehow that doesn't change anything about the carnal glory of legs around his waist, a mouth opening against his, of his terrified self clinging to Sasuke, owning Sasuke, blending with Sasuke.

"Fucking floor," Sasuke grumbles afterwards, still boneless and leaning. Naruto's leaning too, leaning on him, into him.

I, Naruto thinks dizzily. I fucked Sasuke in a cave full of corpses. We killed them and we're still smeared with their blood and _now_ he let me fuck him.

"I did promise," Sasuke says, a thoughtful cast to his face.

His eyes are red again, and his hand's filled with chakra, and on Naruto's stomach.

It detonates through him, a horrifying impure rush of cheated power.

It gives him the strength to roll Sasuke over and kiss him again. Enter him again and fight-fuck him again and come in him again.

Several more times.

The last of which outside, because they finally stumbled out of the stinking pit of debauchery and away from the corpses littering the fresh forest immediately surrounding the cave. He'd never thought Sasuke could touch him so gently, so kindly, as he does then, and that's when Naruto breaks a bit, even though rationally speaking Sasuke's probably just too tired to be violent.

He cries a little, with Sasuke's hands ginger and nice on his neck, Sasuke's voice whispering soft insults in his ear. Because what we've done shouldn't be okay, and yet it is, only not right now.

He knows it will be, though. Knows it'll be another one of those things that really isn't alright but becomes routine, like hitting Sasuke and wanting Kyuubi's chakra.

Right now he feels small and sullied and sundered, and Sasuke's nearness isn't the hurricane force it usually is. Fierce, always that, but as close to kind as Sasuke is capable of, which is more than Naruto has sometimes assumed.

Afterwards, blood and sweat dried and flaking off mostly naked skin, they remain sprawled out in a glade for some time. Sasuke's lying on Naruto's chest, Naruto's hands draped across his back, one palm pressed protectively, provocatively against the edge of his stomach.

"Kakashi's a better man and a worse teacher than I thought if this is the first time you've killed anyone on mission," Sasuke says. Wonderfully tactless, forcing reality back, forcing life back.

"It's not. But that other time was a – mistake."

"You're so pathetically fucking hopeless," Sasuke mutters in what sounds like disgust, but kisses him all the same.

"Just because I didn't pay for private tuition with a perverted serial killer."

"This is getting uncomfortable." Sasuke eases upwards, standing for a moment shady and bloody and bruised in a sunlit forest a late afternoon. Then he flexes his arms with exasperated dismay written all over his features and starts reassembling his clothes.

"You're too damn _good_ for this world," he spits at last. It is not a compliment.

"But I'm not," Naruto says, and the horrible admittance is out and he can't take it back, can't lie, can't denounce the actions that speak so much louder than any words. "I'm just – selfish. Helping so, so maybe I'll be… liked."

Sasuke grabs his hand impatiently, clearly uncomfortable with speech right now, and Naruto's standing upright as well with some pain because the enemies weren't gentle and neither was Sasuke, and though Sasuke's seal is gone the others remain, slowing his healing rate.

Maybe it's okay he never was liked. If he's needed like this.

xxxxx

Tsunade has one word to describe Uchiha Sasuke and Uzumaki Naruto upon their return.

She'd like for it to be victorious, or accomplished, or even sane.

Depressingly, she can't claim to be surprised that it's actually _freshly-fucked._

Naruto looks pretty whole, which must mean Uchiha's released the extra seal, but his clothes are another story, and filth clings to him tenaciously. Grass-stains and blood, dust and dirt, and even a touch of something she thinks might be semen.

Uchiha's in much the same state, but what catches your attention is how swollen his mouth is and all the scratches and bite marks and hand-shaped bruises.

She hates to admit it, but if it weren't for the satisfied tilt to his chin he'd look like the victim of a particularly brutal rape.

There's a shocking jaded emptiness to Naruto's face, except – oh gods damn it all – when he sneaks glances at Sasuke (when he looks alive again).

"Mission accomplished, I take it?" she asks tiredly.

"Yeah," Naruto says. "Obviously. There was no reason for you to have ANBU waiting to bring us in at once."

He smells of animal power and defiance: she can very well imagine him being pressed into believing he has to be the grim solider, that he's going to win the war, win against the war, and then everything will be normal and nice again.

She thought the same herself. So, she is fairly certain, did Sasuke, once upon a time.

For his part Naruto smells age on her, and power and bitterness, traces of sake and light sweat now the heat is coming in earnest.

Because in another glade in the deep parts of the forest Sasuke decided that if you're going to do something, you had better do it all the way through, and Naruto decided he agrees that a half-win is hardly better than complete failure, and Sasuke chanted certain words as his hands drew chakra over Naruto's skin, nullifying all the new seals. Breaking a seal is always so much easier than making it.

Kyuubi seems to be in agreement with Naruto for once that it'd be bad if this new state of affairs were broadcast, because it has been unexpectedly simple keeping the demon chakra in check, laced and leashed inside him but ready now to spring forth.

He wonders what Jiraiya would say, now the man's original plan has taken the first few cautious steps towards success after the spectacular initial failure.

"How's your chakra?" Tsunade asks him at last.

He swallows nonchalantly, considers. "It's fine. I'm learning to control what I can get from Kyuubi."

"Good," she says. He can't tell whether she means it. "Don't take any unnecessary risks."

"Is Kakashi on mission?" Sasuke asks suddenly, and Naruto is relived and a little proud his hands are not fisting.

"Yes," Tsunade replies. "Left the day after you did. Don't worry, he'll be back soon."

Sasuke nods fractionally, then has to grab at his ruined shirt to keep it from slipping at the miniscule movement. It was one thing in the forest, but flashing the Hokage is not a pleasant possibility.

Though it might have been a bit funny, from Naruto's perspective.

Naruto, who forces himself not to be upset. Tries to force himself.

Of course Sasuke wants to see for himself that Kakashi is fine, wants to let Kakashi see he is. There is nothing strange about this.

Even though, thinking back, the only reassurance he ever had was the sullen declaration: _I don't want to sleep with anyone_.

And certainly Sasuke seems willing enough to sleep with him, lately.

Which he isn't about to complain about, but still.

"I doubt we'll face open war for quite some time yet," Tsunade announces solemnly, looking a bit like a primadonna, as she always does when she goes for the dramatic gestures. "Perhaps not for another year or two. Missions will be getting tougher and more frequent, however." She pauses briefly. "How well can you work during the pregnancy?"

"I'd say anything below S-rank is fine this far," Sasuke replies curtly "It might be different further along."

"Excellent." Their chilly smirks mirror each other with frightening precision. "Now, after your latest stint as village savior there has been a dramatic increase in ninja declaring themselves willing to work with you. As for you, though, Naruto, I'm afraid it's quite the opposite."

"That's fine," Naruto says in a brazen voice over the anticipated hollowness gaping inside him. "We work fine with each other."

"I suppose you do, at that," Tsunade says, and doesn't sound happy in the least.

"So," Naruto says. "About the Jounin Exam."

"Ah, yes, about that." She shuffles with something before throwing a small item each at him and Sasuke. "Due to shortage of personal etcetera I've decided to… take some measures regarding that. From this point on, a successfully completed A-rank mission and the agreement of your team mean you've passed. These are your licenses, should you need them." She raises an eyebrow. "Unless, of course, you are inclined to fail each other."

Naruto stares at the little card, at the words he doesn't get even after he's read them five times: Uzumaki Naruto, Registered Jounin of the Hidden Village of Leaf. And the symbols, and ID stuff, and Tsunade's seal.

I'm a Jounin.

It feels like he's cheated. Been cheated.

"Oh," Tsunade looks up from her papers to add. "Iruka says dinner will be served and ready at six o'clock."

"Great," Naruto groans, hungry and tired and beat-up in so many ways, horrified that he'd entirely forgotten about the business with Iruka-sensei.

They take the fast way home, rushing across the roofs. Not only because it's faster and because Naruto would really like to save beating up his assailants as a last resort kind of thing, but also and mostly because it'd be pretty embarrassing for anyone to see them like this.

Shortly they end up in the bath together, and Naruto is… content, as close to happy as he thinks is possible in the circumstances, with the scalding water lapping at his shoulders, watching from under half-closed lids as Sasuke sighs softly and leans his head back, white limbs taking on a relaxed rosy hue from the liquid warmth.

The water has become faintly reddish-brown from blood and grime by the time Sasuke reaches for the soap, the accompanying movement of his leg against Naruto's side rousing the blond from impending slumber.

"Hey," he protests, snagging Sasuke's hand. Its knuckles are blatantly, nastily skinless and his own handprint lies like a handcuff around the wrist. "You okay?"

Sasuke did at least as much damage to him, and the men in the cave got to him worse than to Sasuke, but he doesn't have a scratch, so…

It is an uncomfortable revelation to have to wonder how well he'd be able to deal with slowing, grinding pain, the continuous straining ache of natural healing.

He's not so good yet at reading those golden eyes, can't quite say whether the look they direct at him is insulted or amused.

"It's fine," Sasuke insists. "You can't do anything to me that I don't let you."

Naruto's quiet at that, because he can, they both know he can. Not of the physical variety, of course (of the worse kind).

And probably he could abuse Sasuke, because if Sasuke started hitting him now he wouldn't be able to stop, and Naruto's pretty certain Sasuke's not quite ready to go that far yet.

"I'll heal the worst later, don't worry," Sasuke adds dismissively.

"Why should I worry?" he asks, genuinely puzzled. "You're not seriously hurt."

"I merely assumed you might not want your beloved Iruka-sensei to think you're beating me up for sports. Obviously it was stupid of me to assume you'd mind this great proof of your masculine prowess."

"I am not beating you up for sports!"

"No," Sasuke agrees condescendingly. "You're not beating me up at all."

"Hm. Can I…" He bites his lip, sorting through words that aren't what he wants to say. "Is the baby alright? I mean, after all the… killing and fighting and, um."

"You can't sense for yourself," Sasuke says immediately. "But it's fine."

"Why?" Naruto challenges, though not with much fire. "Jesus, you're so obsessed with your lone hunter routine. Even Hinata let me feel her stomach."

"You're not an Uchiha," Sasuke tells him. "Thus you aren't part of this. It's – private and complicated. I don't want you to have anything to do with it."

"Jeez, alright," he yields, with practiced though ill grace. One argument he can't afford to win. "Anyway, yeah, Hinata's knocked up too. Guess she and Neji are – I mean, they _are_ married, aren't they? Sakura-chan was checking her and – right! Did you, er, know about her and Ino?"

"Did I know what about her and Ino?"

He's never been able to puzzle out post-Orochimaru Sasuke's relationship to Sakura-chan. Distant and protective, possessive and confused and… with that sullen uneasiness and pride over how she doesn't throw herself at his feet anymore. Might be love, he guesses, of a strange sibling-ish kind, maybe (might not be).

"That they're – you know. Kissing, and stuff."

Sasuke's head snaps sharply up. "They are _what_?" He shakes his head. "No, never mind." Then, sharp and hungry and angry: "I think we have time for a quick one before we need to go."

"Wha? Sasuke, you could barely stand up this morning!"

After some exceptionally, um, _passionate_ sex in a cave. That happened quite a few times. And might have been sort of, you know, on the rougher side.

When Naruto was desperately holding on to anything that could be alive and good, and Sasuke was there.

"I would have walked perfectly well, if it weren't for your incessant nagging about it."

"You grimaced and held on to a tree! You looked like you were going to cry when you took the first step!"

Sasuke gapes for a moment at the indignity, then splashes him.

Which is even more undignified, but never mind that now.

"I did not! Also I healed myself," he protests.

"Why didn't you heal all your wounds?" Naruto asks, honestly curious. "You had the chakra to spare, I know you did."

Sasuke huffs and mutters something that might be, "I don't like doing things I'm no good at."

He's not certain, but then again he is not certain of much of anything in the world save of how Sasuke kisses him. It's the same silly rush it was the first time, tinged with bitterness and unholy lust and not as much sweet carefulness as he once imagined he'd want.

Naruto is quite clear on the fact that, no matter if the appointment's a pseudo-family dinner or anything else important, he'll never be in too great a hurry to have sex with Sasuke.

"Mmh," he mumbles afterwards against Sasuke's jaw, which he is also kissing lazily, possessively. "Shit, we are going to be so late."

"I'm devastated."

"You will be," Naruto assures him. "Iruka-sensei's Guilt-Inducing Stare is practically a jutsu. Bet that's what got him through the Chuunin Exam, he just turned the eyes on the judges."

Sasuke snorts, getting to his feet in the slippery tube filled with now lukewarm water that has splashed horribly all over the bathroom during, ah, previous activities.

Thank god they have replications to use as cleaning slaves.

The rest of the mind-numbingly awkward but kindly trying evening would probably have gone better if Sasuke hadn't been such a jerk.

Naruto is very grateful the Uchiha has decided to be nice and civil around Iruka-sensei, make no mistake about that, but then he realizes the polite greeting and the few almost-normal sentences (several of which prompted by naruto kicking him quite hard below the table) predictably left Sasuke bored and eager for revenge.

He manages not to squeak when Sasuke's hand lands on his closest thigh, just above the knee. It gets progressively harder, in rhythm with his face going redder and his breathing more forced, as those damn fingers sneak higher.

"Naruto?" Iruka-sensei asks in concern as Naruto's fingers whiten around the edge of the table. "Is anything the matter?"

Fuck you, Uchiha Sasuke.

…uh, bad choice of words, there.

"Ehhheheh, not at all! Why would you think that?"

It works out, all the same, if not in the way as he originally wished. Most things seem to, in the end.

xxxxxxxxxx


	26. Just Something

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 26:**

"**Just Something"**

Sasuke negotiates the garden path, quite carefully refusing to let any thought of consequence form.

Fresh grass and an assortment of flowers, the commercial kind grown for easy gardening and spots of color with no dignified history as somber symbols to cling to. His mother always disliked that sort of simple arrangements, bought for small coin and with no labor or thought attached. Both his mothers (both of whom also thought he should not actually have known this, the genius son).

Never, for as long as he can remember (and he can remember considerably farther back than this body of his has lived) has he felt at home in modern buildings, in the civilian districts with their picket fences and pastel curtains.

Perhaps he should venture to the Hyuuga stronghold one of these days, measure the living pulse of ancient blood there against his memories.

Memory, though (i sigh, pushing bangs from my face). What good is memory, of the personal kind?

There was the first began life, chasing memory, obsessed with gathering it around himself like a lover. To become a legend, and _forever_, cheat the world of forgetting, of making him disappear.

Then the second, when ironically that ambition had succeeded. When he was the child who could not forget, not a single part of the happiness or the hatred: had become a container for the past that reached through him into the future.

(what good is it that anyone remembers?)

His first mother's whispered bedtime stories about the old legends, the pre-time fairytale of bloody power, the relief when it turned out he really was a prodigy, because with his father gone and the rumors his mother had had a snake sire him, only being a genius could have saved him in a village moving into war.

The soil ought to be rich now, from all the blood, worms fattening in the ripe, rotting bodies of all the lost people he has known.

What good is it that I remember?

He knocks on the white door, hears shuffling inside almost at once. The door opens inwards, revealing a generous slice of Sakura's father, who startles at the sight of him.

"Good day," Sasuke says without inflection, realizing absently that he cannot recall when last he spoke to a civilian. "I'm here to see Haruno Sakura."

"I – see. This way, come on in."

Sasuke steps gingerly into the crowded hallway, nods curtly as the man directs up him the short staircase.

Up the familiar steps in the fake middle class-perfect house, to that same pale door. On which he knocks too, just to be sure (because i'm _not_ sure).

"Yeah?" Sakura calls through it.

"It's me. Sasuke."

"…alright."

Sasuke notes that that is not an invitation. He also notes that his hand is pushing the door open.

Sakura does not look surprised (is he?) where she stands toweling her hair, wrapped in a bathrobe.

Trained, superior genius' eyes like his, yellow and tearless, cannot avoid noting the long golden pieces of same sticking to the robe, to the pillow in her bed (where her arm was soft against his back and his fingers hard around her throat and their eyes met and it wasn't too late after all. so he thought then. now i'm not so sure)

"Hello," she says, her voice a little hoarse around the soft tone. Her face is wary and impersonal as she puts the towel away, thin pink hair falling wildly about her face, cheeks pale underneath the shower-flush.

"I – meant to see you," he says, awkward with honesty (as i've never been with lies?). "After I – hurt you. I needed to see how you are."

"I'm alright," she says. Hints at a smile but looks tired and bitter. "I huddled under the covers and cried for a bit, but it passed. I'm alright now." Slim, hard fingers sketch an oddly hurt gesture towards her throat. "See? Not even a scratch left."

"I see. That's – good." He sounds like a voice from a headset, tinny and broken up.

"As a matter of fact," she says, speaking fast through inevitable pain, "I think you don't see. I think that's always been the problem, with us. With me and Team Seven in its entirety." She bites at her lip, a gesture traditionally hesitant but not so now, not with her. "You can't even imagine being frightened just because someone almost asphyxiated you."

(she can totally picture naruto being so used to waking up to sasuke's strangling that he simply grunts, elbows sasuke in the head and wraps his arms around him to make sure he won't try again, all without completely waking up. can't quite decide whether the absurd conjecture makes her want to giggle or cry)

(_i was afraid enough when itachi came for me_)

She clings to composure, shakes her head – a sad, distracted movement. "I imagine that that is the reason…well, for a lot of things, really. I've been, been trying to fit into Team Seven, to be a part of what it means, of what you have – you and Naruto and, and Kakashi too in a fashion – but sometimes, oft-times, I doubt that's even possible, for me." Her throat strains around a swallow. "I doubt it now."

And she looks at him, watches him standing in her normal room being the stuff of legends, and why won't he say anything?

"I'll always love you," she continues, shaky, certain. "You and Naruto both. But I don't want to – I don't want to die. And I think I would, if I tried seriously to cling to you."

Sasuke looks at her calmly, and he is not going to scream at her, he is not going to hit her, he is not going to hold her.

"I," she starts, eyes aching from tears she will not spill, switching approach as abruptly and tactlessly as Sasuke himself. "I assume Naruto told you about me and Ino."

"He mentioned he saw you kissing." Curt words, exact words, because it can mean everything or nothing. Sasuke knows that, of course.

"She understands some things," Sakura says, tired. Wanting to cry in his arms because she can't have him, ever. Wanting to cry for wanting to cry, because I don't even want him anymore, do I? "And she likes me, and she's good to me. I can laugh with her and talk to her and it feels nice when we touch."

It's not nothing; it's not everything. It's just something.

He thinks very seriously about killing Ino.

(you're supposed to be _mine_!)

Blood over the sunlight hair, blue eyes that are never to open again.

Except that's – too close to images he doesn't need, a reminder of certain other blue eyes that can't be allowed the milky sheen of death, ever.

He contemplates he might protect her, then, step between her and coming danger.

As he's done a hundred thousand times for Sakura, except on all the occasions when he really should have, when she really needed me to.

Why?

He doesn't know, can't find any spectacular feature to point to as a justification for that particular possessive protectiveness.

"Sasuke," she says, then. "Tell me what's been done to Naruto. Why his chakra is red."

He considers briefly, but is not, after all, used to lying to Sakura. "Kyuubi."

Because he wants to lash out, and to be needed and to give her something. Something precious and deadly, all at once.

Her face freezes slowly, horror and comprehension dawning gradually on her.

"Oh," she says, and sinks down onto her bed. "Oh."

He crosses his arms over his chest, leaning back against the wall: if he went to her he would be going too far.

"That was always the problem," she repeats, voice jarring softly. "You don't – know me. And I, I don't know you. No, really – it's like, Naruto could never be anyone to you but Naruto. He's distinct and irreplaceable. Forced his way into your life. Kakashi too, I suppose. I was just the tag-along. I'm… something that can be perceived as precious, something to be protected, because you don't know anything about me. The me you know is something you created in your mind. And I did – did something very similar to you."

She draws in a deep, shaking breath, hands trembling on her thighs. Can't stop now.

"If I hadn't made it into your team you'd never have noticed me at all. You'd just have felt the same strange bit of affection for whatever sweetly helpless girl they put with you instead. It could just as easily have been Ino, at least she's brave, or Tenten. I'm so normal it didn't have to be me at all."

She leans her head backwards until the tears can't fall.

"I used to wonder what it was that Naruto thought he saw in me, but now I think about it it's so obvious. It didn't have anything to do with who I am either, just with how _normal_ I am. Think about it. He never had anyone normal, the way average people do. All the rest of you, you were separate individuals. I just represented everything he'd always been denied, always wanted. He doesn't know me either, and now at least he's realized I'm not what he – what he's really after."

Neither her nor the Hokage title, at the heart of things. Just Sasuke, and by the way has he gone fucking mute or something?

She swallows thinly, gets up. "I have no special personality. I'm just an accumulation of what the average girl is supposed to be." Rubs at her eyes (and he is not going to wipe her tears for her, he is not) forces herself into everyday briskness, a harsh glossy cover. "Anyway, I have to be going. Do you want me to check the baby? I'm guessing you wouldn't like to return to the hospital for it." And there she pauses, thinks. "Hospital, huh – isn't that what every woman wants? To heal others, because they don't know what to do with themselves?"

Whatever it is that she wants from him, he can't give it to her. Doesn't even know what it is.

That shouldn't smart.

"Alright," he says. It's not a good idea, probably – being close to ninja he can handle, but a ninja is not what she is to me.

"I always thought," she mumbles, standing close and reminding him that, infuriatingly, even she is taller than he at present. "If it had been Naruto trying to stop you, before you went away – you wouldn't have just left him?"

Sasuke snorts at the ridiculous thought, unwinding from his defensive position. "He'd never have let me."

"Oh," she says, as though this were some kind of revelation instead of the most painfully obvious thing. "Of course. That's the whole difference, then. That's what it's all about."

Her hand ghosts over his stomach, chakra light and ticklish as it's absorbed into his body. He does trust her now, then: discovers it through the lack of unease as she does whatever it is that she does to him.

"If you ever thought about," she says, "that thing I said, about how I asked you to please don't leave me behind. Then don't, anymore."

"I never really have," he replies, and wonders why she flinches – if she's so worried about having burdened him with her dead weight, shouldn't it be a relief to know she hasn't?

You can't leave someone behind who was never with you.

Except that isn't really how it was, with Team Seven, their eternal shades of gray.

(_you do understand i could not allow myself to think of leaf at all, right?_)

There are steps in the hallway outside, followed by the swoosh of the door being opened without knocking.

"Hello, handsome," Ino says, eyes alight on the tableau of Sakura finishing her examination. Then she sees his eyes, and startles badly, staring in unmasked horrified disgust, the way Sakura could not allow herself or she would never have stopped screaming.

"Ino," she says, and smiles. It is not the kind of smile that can light up a vast hall, nor even a small room. It's bright and happy, all the same.

She turns to Sasuke, still warm (not for him). "It's healthy."

He nods, mechanically, walking fast out of the house, this stupid shallow dream that should not hold together in a ninja world; pastels impossibly surviving in the red darkness of reality.

Out in the village his progress is followed as always by moronic awe and crawling fear, people stopping to stare with failed covertness at him. Deserved though the sentiments may be, the attention itches, right now. Fleetingly meeting the gaze of a fat woman who takes an instinctive step back in apparent fright, Sasuke smirks humorlessly and jumps atop a roof.

The world is no clearer up here, but the wind is stronger and pleasant.

His feet know exactly where to go, mumbling directions into his legs until he's running across, occasionally hopping between, the roofs that have met so many ninja feet.

He should think they are rather past the stage where politeness requires knocking, just slips in through the open bedroom window.

It feels like it has been a very long time since he learned how easiest to sneak into this particular apartment, which floor-beds creek and how to avoid them, but it hardly matters: he hasn't been shielding his chakra. Walks quietly but no doubt noticed across the floor, stops very close to the man who lives here, standing so there is just an inch of bleak sunlight separating their forms.

"Kakashi," he growls.

Finally his once-teacher, once-lover, once-mentor turns from his indulgent study of a bookcase filled with rated paperbacks, stares mildly down at him. Kakashi looks worn, tanned and tired, as well one should expect after an intense mission in southern lands. His skin has gone leathery, clinging dark and rough around prominent bones (looks strong, solid, and you won't go away).

Sasuke's feet might have known the way here, and his limbs the easiest way to slink in through the window, but his mind is still sitting back and observing as his body presses itself against Kakashi's, hands clutching at his shoulders, face resting briefly against his chest.

"Didn't you only just make up with Naruto?"

Sasuke can't quite decide whether the pain in his tone is something the amusement fails to hide or a part of the deception that Kakashi is in any sort of control.

"This isn't about Naruto."

It's about Sasuke, even though Naruto will know, and they'll fight, and it will be – everything. The absolute thrill of being alive, of being needed unto death.

Before that there is this, Kakashi's neck for his arms to rest demanding around, Kakashi's hair and face for his fingers to conduct a teasing re-exploration off.

Because Kakashi wants him so much it borders on need, and I don't _really_ have to prove to myself that Kakashi won't retreat from me.

(then what am i doing?)

"Of course," Kakashi murmurs obligingly. Sasuke can't tell whether he's being very sarcastic or perfectly matter-of-fact. It doesn't disturb him, right now.

Things are difficult, but he's a difficult person, he knows that much from others' (my own) reactions and readily admits to it.

"What have you been up to, then?" Kakashi asks at length, his hands a sudden comfort on Sasuke's waist.

Sasuke shrugs. "Nothing much."

Nothing that can be properly articulated, because Sakura belongs to the old Uchiha Sasuke, and language is the tool of what was once Orochimaru. He's not quite ready to breach the border between memories yet, reluctant to bring the resultant confusion upon himself. One day he will have to brave it, but as yet it is not necessary.

"Is that so?" Kakashi replies airily. "I heard you and Naruto were quite… excessive in completing your mission."

"We were told to annihilate as many minions as practically possible," Sasuke says, smirk-smiling. "It was perfectly possible to kill them all."

He tilts his head, letting the top of it rest with a strange, familiar sort of tense laziness against Kakashi's shoulder even as he faces the man.

"You still smell like the desert," he tells him.

"Huh. At least the sand didn't start telling me to be a good son and kill things."

Sasuke grins, just a little, not quite as guarded as he ought to be even though it's a careful, sardonic expression, more adult than his adolescent face is readily willing to produce.

"I imagine it must have been a scintillating trip, conversing with all the elaborate Sand folk."

"Unsurprisingly I preferred the conversation of my team."

"You didn't go alone?" I'm surprised at that, feel – cold.

Which is stupid. Kakashi is a professional.

So's Sasuke, and it's time he bloody remembered it.

Fuck.

"Anko went with me."

"Anko?" Sasuke replies, incredulous, and doesn't react. Won't react. "She's nothing but the failed byproduct of a dead man's work."

"She's survived him," Kakashi argues, still lightly, and curse and bless him for that. "She's caustic and has nice legs."

"Of course," Sasuke says. "Legs are known for their spectacular conversational brilliance."

"They have other qualities." The bemusement fades into something sharper, more resigned. "Is it me or her you're jealous of?"

"I am not jealous," Sasuke huffs immediately. Tells his emotions to fuck off and leave this to his brain, calms and puts on a spectacularly vicious smirk that is not at all related to a smile. "Why the hell should I be jealous of a man who's too in love with the Sasuke part of me to think, or a woman who's spent her entire life hating the Orochimaru part because she loved him so goddamn much?"

"Since when do you require a reason, Sasuke?" Tired, and yet with that glint of humor, and that grudging affection.

"This isn't fair to you," Sasuke says, and can't believe for long minutes that the voice which issued the absurdly true words was actually his own.

"I've never wanted fair," Kakashi mumbles in reply, mumbles it into his hair. Sasuke feels the sharp tip of Kakashi's nose against his scalp, thinks about stepping back and decides to press closer.

One of Kakashi's hands slinks from his hip up to his throat by way of his breast, stroking his neck to curve invitingly, his face into leaning backwards, his mouth laid open for a kiss. Of the languorous, melting kind Kakashi does best, sharp softened movements working their way inside you.

Sasuke lets his arms relinquish the grip around Kakashi's neck slowly, fingers splaying instead over collarbones, chest, undoing buttons, testing the skin within the confines of the soon pushed-open shirt.

It's tight and pale and lightly scarred. A singing expanse of jolts under his hands. And his mouth.

The bed is too far away, and would make this lie too bold besides.

Better to have Kakashi's deft hands unhook his pants here, better to shimmy partway out of them and aid his companion's lifting him; wriggle against the wall at his back before Kakashi's hand slips, distractingly, and Sasuke must bite his lip on a very undignified sound.

Better to have Kakashi ease himself into him fast and immediate and still with that ever-present infuriatingly tender carefulness, and cling hard enough he remains hanging on between Kakashi and the wall when they sag afterwards.

"Not that I'm complaining," Kakashi mumbles into his ear, pressing a chaste kiss to the side of his face, "but do you even know why you're doing this?"

The problem is that he does.

He wants to be _better_ for Sakura, a better person, a good man. He needs Naruto to desire what he actually is.

Kakashi is a secure respite between them, a breathing space. His safety.

He snorts helplessly, bitterly into the rumpled fabric of Kakashi's shirt. Things aren't spinning crazily anymore, I have some measure of control, except, always except, when it matters most, and _this isn't how it was supposed to be_.

It is only long afterwards that Kakashi conjectures perhaps he should be ashamed. He shrugs it off after the briefest of contemplations, however: regularly purchasing _Icha Icha Paradise_ for more than a decade has done wonders for his shame-resistance.

Not that he's ever thought, really, that _Icha Icha Paradise_ is anything to be ashamed of. They're just stories, of pretty, perfect worlds where attraction is always mutual and resolved, laced with sweet love of the kind he's never even wanted to try for.

xxxxx

Naruto rolls out of bed groggily, only distantly aware he's been alone in it for quite a while. Right now he's actually kind of glad to have the space to himself, since he was forced into a private training session with Jiraiya last night and the bastard pervert got him drunk.

It was established which Naruto is slightly surprised it took Tsunade this long to confirm: that only half the original Kyuubi seal remains. Jiraiya took the other part of it away back in the forest, and it can't be redone. The master technique Sasuke placed on him he has removed, and the chaos-work of new incomplete sealing that was administered during his Tsukiyomi-induced nightmare coma were only ever frail restraints.

Right now his skull seems to be what's in danger of breaking, though. Goddamn Jiraiya.

Naruto has never been drunk before, and it's just typical of his life to let the first time include a seedy bar and a pervert hermit and too bloody much bloody awful sake. It didn't even taste all that good.

Punished with the murderous hangover slamming through his head, the cheap (necessary) relief and camaraderie it brought seems far from worth the price.

"Ugh," Naruto mutters, and gets to his feet, holding on to the wall partly because the world is spinning and partly because he has to keep his eyes closed against the dimmed light slipping past the curtains. At least Sasuke left those closed.

What he didn't do was be a considerate roommate and leave coffee on the stove or something. Or a bucket.

Oh shit, bad thoughts, bad thoughts.

Soon followed by bad action, because swallowing dryly only works for so long. How the hell did Sasuke manage every single morning to be leaning with precision over sink or toilet when the sickness hit him? Naruto barely makes it two steps in the right direction before the vomit pushes out of his mouth.

Oh, yuck. And the stench makes him feel even worse, prompting new rushes of retches.

Finally, bent over and gagging on the aftertaste, he's emptied his stomach utterly. Should probably clean up the mess, but can't find the energy. Needs sleep or food to get the energy, but he isn't tired anymore and the mere thought of eating makes his abdomen spasm threateningly.

"Shit," he mutters in a hoarse, cracking voice. Didn't Sakura-chan leave some painkillers somewhere?

Finally he finds the stashes of white pills in one of the cabinets, tucked in neatly beside containers filled with equally white rice.

Jeez, is Sasuke trying to color-coordinate the kitchen or something?

Yeah, whatever. He gulps down painkillers and something against the nausea, puts some water to heat on the stove before he lets himself collapse at the table and waits for the meds to kick in and the liquid to boil.

Mercifully, half and hour and half a pot of bitter tea later he actually feels mostly alive again. Probably Sakura-chan figured they'd need really strong painkillers after fighting. Fuck Kyuubi for being considerably worse at healing poisoning than physical wounds.

Oh well, time to brave the new day. The vomit-cleaning can wait until his stomach has stopped wobbling entirely. Sidestepping it and pulling a fresh shirt over his head, he locks the door behind him and jogs through the Uchiha Compound.

(to think this is my home now, this dead noble district with all the spilled blue blood nourishing the rich soil)

He quickens his pace at the sight of people milling around just outside the perimeter, slows down again once he comes close enough to realize it's not an assembly but a mob. Villagers of all ages and sizes, men and women and children, ninja and civilians. Armed professionally or with stones and household items. Mouths open in curses, in screams, in calling damnation over him.

It does not seem the Kyuubi unsealing is any kind of secret anymore.

Hands land on him the moment he steps past the gateway into the normal village – he'd hoped they wouldn't go quite so far. Words he can handle, spit he has dealt with before.

"I'm fucking tired of this," he sneers. "Let go."

He ducks a punch, decides this has really gone too far – _there is no longer anything you can give me._

He's never liked being a victim, smashes his fist into the closest man's face and kicks another.

He's not sealed anymore, and most of them are only civilians.

No charka, he reminds himself. Don't kill anyone. Has to remind himself, because anger is in him now, the disgusted bitter fury, and he's done worse. It'd be easy.

This is for everything you've done to me.

This is for everything you never did for me.

This hard fucking village that is too precious too give you anything for free, ever.

Somewhere far away he thinks he catches sight of Konohamaru, who locks an attacker's arms behind his back but looks horrified when Naruto exploits the opportunity and knocks the impaired guy out. Further to the edge there's Iruka-sensei, Sakura-chan, but no one will listen to them.

The ANBU have come as well but are clearly employing a very strict don't-harm-civilians policy.

Naruto jumps atop a house, leaving the mess temporarily behind. Offering to, at least.

Well, if they're persistent and stupid enough to follow – nobody's doing anything, nobody's ever doing anything, not about orphans and not about sickening customs, not about him or Sasuke or Neji and Hinata alone and brutalized in their homes.

I'm tired of just smiling and taking it, tired of ignoring this shit and thinking someday, someday it'll be better.

He's finishing this now.

He snaps out of the concentrated fog of smashing his fists and feet into everyone approaching when the guy looming over him is thrown backwards before Naruto's hit has connected. He checks his forward momentum just in time to avoid thrusting his knuckles into Sasuke instead.

He must have dropped straight down from one of the roofs, like Kakashi is doing now, landing elegantly crouched next to them. He looks a ninja for once, all flashy display, and they're back to back, all three of them, and Naruto thinks he could cry but crushes a last nose instead.

"Is this any way to treat the son and selected heir of the Fourth Hokage, hero and savior of this village?" Kakashi's voice is a herald's, strong and carrying, not particularly pleasant, and Naruto reels with the receding tide of the crowd.

It is very clear that Sasuke is siding with him, and the Uchiha is everyone's coveted idol, and Kakashi's solid presence beside him speaks of the administration's support despite the reluctant ANBU – and what Kakashi just said… can't actually be true, can it?

But he's seen the pictures, of course he has, the monuments and paintings of the Fourth, and it does fit. Seems they realize it too, most people, or at least come to the sound conclusion they are better off pretending they do.

Take away the whisker marks, add some maturity and handsomeness, and his face would be disturbingly similar to the dead leader's.

The dead hero who was rumored to have a secret mistress, who in turn is rumored to have killed herself when word of his death was brought to her, even though she had only just given birth.

No one knew who she was, though. Only that she'd been beautiful and mysterious, as women of legend always are.

"Her name was Yuiko," Kakashi tells him, twenty minutes later atop a far-off roof. "She had the temper of a naughty brat and the looks of a love goddess. She was loved by all men, hated by all women, liked by no one." He shrugs, reaches for a cigarette (remembers her, cold smiling lips). "Nobody thought you had to know, or that it would be suitable to tarnish a great man's legacy with a filthy rumor few were likely to believe."

"Right," Naruto says, and looks only at Sasuke, at the signs he doesn't want to see but can't tear his gaze from.

Sasuke nods at him, a short graceful moment.

An hour later they have leveled much of the forest surrounding the village. They are both panting, stained with grime and blood. Both wearing ferocious grins of sick, adrenaline-slick excitement Naruto wanted never to feel, not like this, but now he does and there's lightning inside him.

"Would you stop fucking cheating on me with Kakashi!" he howls, one hand pushing sweat-matted hair from his eyes, the other edging Sasuke's cheek, dusting it with the merest outskirt of a blow.

Movement, furiously fast, connection, forged in bruises, until Sasuke's on his back and smirking widely up at him, eyes so red, so red. He obviously allowed himself to fall, could kick Naruto off any second, force a hand sparkling with chakra through him that Naruto would ignore through the tearing pain of it all.

He doesn't.

"Dammit, Sasuke," Naruto cries, and it's a yell, it's a whisper. "You have to give me something!"

He's reminded of the first time he was braced over Sasuke needing something desperately (when sasuke had one red and one yellow eye and spat in his face. over the waters, in the valley, in the end).

"Why don't you take it?"

He's shuddering, has gone through the fear and out past it where the world is stark. No less engaging.

"Because what I want from you can only be given."

Sasuke is quiet for a long time, so tense he's shaking faintly. Finally he says, breaking taboos Naruto hasn't even named: "Years ago you slept over on my floor. You were dreaming, mumbling in your sleep about a red thread of fate. That you'd finally found."

He collects himself, eyes going yellow instead of red, mouth forming a self-scorning little smirk.

Naruto nods, and things are okay, are not okay at all, but are, except they aren't, have to be, can't be, and–

_It is hauling us in, the red thread of fate, throttling us._

xxxxxxxxxx


	27. The Way of Leaf

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 27:**

"**The Way of Leaf"**

Being a ninja is fucking troublesome. Worse if you're ranked and friends with important people and there's a war coming.

I didn't ask for this, Shikamaru feels like saying, except the words are too pointless to be worth his breath. A lot of things are.

"Shikamaru," the Hokage says, and he wishes fleetingly he could see through her illusion, because it's a damn lot easier to be cheeky and dismissive when you aren't intimidated by beauty, even if you know it's false. When you aren't tempted to rest your gaze on breasts that shouldn't be on display and (he reminds himself) don't actually look like they appear to look anyway. "I'm sure you're aware of the current state of affairs."

He looks at her blandly in that way he's perfected, trained since early childhood by disinterested and nagging parents, later by Asuma's badly phrased lectures.

She nods impatiently at the extra chair. "Sit down."

Cautiously he slumps into the desperately uncomfortable chair that's probably Shizune's, since, embarrassingly, their Hokage can't be trusted to do her own paperwork. He sprawls indolently, accepting the glass she hands him and lifting it to his mouth without drinking, faking the swallowing movement of his throat.

"I need information," she says. "I need a good mind to take a look at certain things, handle certain missions. I also need Naruto to be useful to the village, contribute. I need him to belong."

Shikamaru nods, tracing the design on his glass. Of course.

The open animosity receded after Naruto finally lost it and started hitting back, that spectacular late morning when he beat up a dozen villagers and a handful ninja. When his heritage was declared, and Uchiha So-Called Savior of the Village Sasuke stood next to him with red eyes, touch-close.

It wouldn't surprise Shikamaru if the snake-eyed bastard considers the entire business highly amusing, but at least he's given enough public displays for anyone with an ounce of gray matter between the ears to realize he's sleeping with Naruto.

But Tsunade doesn't want Naruto to belong only to Sasuke, or even only to Team Seven, come to that.

She wants the village to need him, and for him to need the village.

Heh. What a troublesome goddamn mess.

"You have the men to spare?" he asks at last, because it's been really efficient during the last months to send Sasuke and Naruto with each other or alone on difficult missions. Double profit, when the A-ranks don't require a full team.

But it's left Naruto jaded and the public coldly shuddering away from his blood-splattered grin of pain.

"I do," she says. "You'll take a look at the mission and then we'll have a talk about who needs to be on it besides you and Naruto."

"Alright," he mutters, reaching to receive the worn documents. They passed the point of rulebook interaction years ago, when the first men under his command died and Temari kissed him. Right here, in front of Tsunade.

He's careful not to touch her hand as he takes the papers, which are just a smudge whiter than her skin. He tried it once, finger brushing light as summer rain across the side of her palm, to see how the illusion felt, how far it could trick senses other than sight.

The perfected sensation of flawless skin, impossibly smooth, unmarked by weapon or age, has left him careful not to repeat the incident.

"Be good," she admonishes affectionately, and he throws a mock salute over his shoulder as he leaves.

It's a humid day, a tactile memory of summer carefully scrutinized by the begun fall. He looks for clouds reflexively but finds only fog.

He doesn't want to go home just yet, though, so makes himself comfortable in one of the familiar nice spots strewn all over the village and found one after the other by Shikamaru's lazy feet, and opens the files.

"A-rank, huh," he mutters, chewing on a straw. Well, what had he been expecting?

Good thing, then, that Ino is too occupied with Sakura lately to be upset about being left out. At least, he reckons she's too occupied for the upset to last more than a few days.

Good thing, too, that both of them seem to be over Sasuke at last.

Or good thing Ino seems to be. He doesn't want to bother evaluating Sakura's entanglements (don't want to make it my responsibility), studies the mission instead.

Hmm, hmm, with his brains and Naruto's raw power it should work out fine, but Naruto's unpredictable, always has been really, and there's a sharp tint to him now, a hard edge that wasn't there before. Maybe not against anyone and definitely not against others from Leaf.

He'll bring Temari then, if she'll go, because Chouji is kind and fat and slow. Not ninja material – but then, what is?

Sighing, he contemplates skimming through the mission details but decides it can wait. Certain other things can't, not without severely unpleasant consequences. This in mind, admitting with a rueful inward chuckle that he is thoroughly whipped, he lazes to his feet and swings himself off the roof, landing with a grunt as the modest impact travels up his legs. The citizens are used enough to worse displays, by now, not to pay a grumpy young man jumping buildings any mind. He's never been flashy, wanders slowly through the village streets towards the main gate.

He knows all the guards at this point, has worked with most of them, nods in greeting and props himself against the wall of the watcher cubicle.

"Waiting for your girl?" a busybody Chuunin guard asks, not unkindly.

"Fair warning," Shikamaru mutters, not opening his eyes. "She'll castrate you if she hears you refer to her as anyone's girl."

The man laughs the carefree laugh of someone who has not been on Temari's bad side, and Shikamaru sighs against the thick sunlight and jealously mourns his lost innocence.

Remembers a dinner, when the tactile establishing of fact rings through his head that _this is nothing like I planned my life_. For one, he's always said he'd get himself a bland, mediocre girl, and Temari's damn – not pretty, but hot as hellfire. Worse, now they're sitting in his childhood home for a family meal, and his parents hate her.

Of course, he's pretty sure her parents hate him too, expect they're dead so their opinions don't much matter.

However, he also always said, with equally deep conviction, that he'd get himself a girl with no scary brothers who could threaten to beat him up. Needless to say he failed miserably at that since Temari frightens off every other girl who dares so much as look at him.

"If you hurt her," Kankurou warned him once, smiling beneath that thick layer of makeup that somehow never smeared, like it contained some sort of magical sweat-immunity ingredient, "I promise you'll regret it. For a very long time. Then you won't be able to regret anything at all."

The way his twisted his fingers just slightly, the blue glow of chakra only hinted, was not exactly subtle in Shikamaru's book. Especially not when that damn creepy doll rattled somewhere behind him, hidden among the pack of Sand villagers celebrating whatever festivity Temari had insisted he accompany her to.

"Sure," Shikamaru said, forcing a grin while mentally performing a frantic calculation of possible battle outcomes. He could take Kankarou. Probably. Maybe.

Unfortunately that was when he caught sight of Gaara giving him a short but very level glance. Even now, with all that water under the bridge, those blank green orbs were ringed with black – a reminder clear as daylight that there is a point where cunning and intelligence don't matter anymore, a point where the opponent goes from strong to genius, becomes simply too powerful.

That or possessed by a demon, take your pick. Genius is a much politer description, though, and the Hokage had always insisted they take every opportunity to promote peace, so that was the term Shikamaru would keep to outwardly, regardless of what vocabulary he used in his head.

…he also realized that there was at least one too many blond women ordering him around.

But yeah, he's shit out of luck on the brother-front, a remembrance that pushes a light sigh past his lips as he passes his mother the bowl of peas. Gaara might have mellowed out a little, but mellow for Gaara still means batshit murder crazy when applied to anyone else, and where before he might not have cared if Shikamaru broke his sister's heart, now he'll quite gladly take the excuse to kill him for it. Imagine that the joys of having in-laws should grace me before I've even tied the knot.

Mind, not that Temari would need anyone else to kick his ass for her, should he ever act out of line.

And not that he believes, really, that he could break her heart, even if he tried. Temari's a tough bitch and this, whatever the bond between them is that has drawn her here to eat his mother's slightly under-cooked food, well, he's not right sure how to define it but it isn't strangling.

It isn't all that much later that he stands waiting at the gate and she saunters through it, followed by two burly Sand ninja with great heaps of luggage strapped to their backs.

"Hello, Shikamaru," she says, and kisses his cheek, in that old ploy to humiliate him in public that has never worked but that he pretends does because he sort of likes her to do that.

The guard gives him a knowing smile, and Shikamaru sighs and kisses her properly. She smiles against his mouth but steps back fast, turning to her travel companions.

"You can leave my things here: I understand you are in a hurry to return."

She watches them hurriedly bow and tensely smile, turning to head back immediately.

Things must be worse in Sand than he thought.

God, what a bother – they're allies, now, and so if Sand engages in another civil war… he doesn't want to think about it. Just let the aggressors kill each other and the world will be a calm and peaceful place for the rest of us, that's always been the Nara Way of War.

Not that that's realistically workable, with one fiery blond for his Hokage and another for his girlfriend.

And he's learned the fundamentals of being a good boyfriend, at least. Steps up to be a solid warmth behind her shoulder and holds her hand as she watches her kinsmen run for a few long moments before shaking her head briskly, tawny hair swishing against his face.

"Let's go, then."

"Let's," he agrees, rather less autocratic or enthusiastic, and all but breaks his back hefting half of the packs.

One of the guards shows the audacity to laugh at his plight, but redeems himself but calling out a, "Wait up! I'll help you out with those."

"Thank you," Temari says in the perfunctory way of someone who was raised correctly but is not used to needing or accepting assistance.

Her load is considerably smaller than either of theirs; of course, it'd have to be. Last time Shikamaru saw her naked a few days had passed since the Incident, but it was not a pretty sight. They think she'll recover fully, though (they think).

He remembers getting the message when slouching in the assembly room in one of the guard towers, scribbling down a few notes on the traps he should be preparing for the Academy kids' training. He looks up from this less than compelling activity (though actually it's a bit fun too, almost like a game), looks up because he hears panting from the doorway, and doing so he sees a rushed messenger.

"Shikamaru," the man says with something like pity, and only then does Shikamaru realize this can't be the usual official business.

Oh shit, he thinks. They must have sent out Ino and Chouji with only Asuma to tell them what to do.

Oh god. He's never going to forgive whoever killed them. The quill snaps audibly in his hands, and he can't even appreciate what a small silly demonstration that is.

Doesn't think he'll ever be able to appreciate anything again.

"There's been a message from Sand," Messenger Man says, and Shikamaru is so relived he thinks he might faint, then so scared he's fucking petrified. "Gaara's been… more unstable, lately, and apparently he snapped rather badly yesterday. His sister was hurt. Not lethally, they don't think, but bad."

"Oh," Shikamaru says, and marvels at the abject stupidity contained in that single syllable. "I see. I need to see the Hokage. Excuse me."

He's never ever talked in chopped polite sentences before, ever.

Tsunade has clearly been expecting him since he's let in practically at once, yet she raises an eyebrow.

"What are you doing here, Nara?" And she really does sound as if she doesn't know perfectly well. Impressive bitch, isn't she. "Your girl's waiting for you."

Shikamaru snaps his mouth shut, because being rude to the Hokage is never productive, not when he's in a _hurry_ and she could detain him. Nothing can be allowed to do that – can he take bodyguards, so he won't have to be held up by potential threats?

"Shizune's waiting for you downstairs," Tsunade adds, as kindly as he suspects she's able.

"Thanks," he says, forces himself to say, though he can see perfectly well it's an ideal political implication – sending the smart, observant spy who won't ever be suspected because he's just there to mind his sweetheart, and the nice healer lady for goodwill points.

They run through the woods and then the desert mostly in silence, making camp a few times because both of them are sensible, but never staying for more than a few hours of cat-napping.

The sea of sand means blisters on his feet, sand slipping inevitably into his shoes. That's his first thought, before he digests the immensity, the emptiness. Death and eternity both lay claim to the desert, that much is clear.

Four days later they reach the village proper, escorted the last few miles by Sand ninja. Shizune's evident medical expertise if nothing else grants them immediate admittance to Temari by order of the harsh elder man with half his face masked whom Shikamaru vaguely recognizes from the Chuunin Exam mess three years ago – fortunate, because at present he does not feel equal to a more elaborate persuasion than the shadow jutsu.

Then he's there, in the small hot room with the dusty air that stinks of old blood, and _she's here_. Lying back against several pillows, a familiar (_missed_, and it's the first time he thinks that word in connection to her) smirk turning the corners of her wide mouth minutely, weakly upwards in the suddenly pallid face.

"Hi," he says, and is across the room, and reaching for her dry, cold fingers. He's used to the rough skin, the millions of minimal scars from unending coarse contact with the sand that is everywhere here; and used to them being warm and sure, deft.

"Excuse me," Shizune interrupts before any sweet nothings can be exchanged. "I'm a medical ninja. I understood things were rather bad…?"

"So they claim," Temari acknowledges with a miserably failing attempt at levity. "The useless dolts."

Apparently having a genius healer for their Hokage makes a difference Shikamaru has never previously reflected over, because the physicians here are cowed enough to mumble apologies and request that Shizune take a look as soon as possible.

"It's my pleasure," she assures them, tying her hair back even as she speaks. "Perhaps you should leave for now, Shikamaru."

"I'll inconvenience you?"

"Oh, no. Not me."

He looks at Temari then, eyebrow raised, and would have been quite surprise had she done anything but mirror the expression, smile deepening.

"I should hardly flatter myself into thinking I'm in danger of a lustful assault just now," she says, and that's that.

The words are meaningless, a reassuring snarky hum, because now Shizune pushes the sheets away and loosens the hospital gown, and Shikamaru sees what's under them. It doesn't look like Temari's body – he's familiar enough with that, lean muscle and comfortable curves, light tan. Today it's swollen, painted over with a bruised rainbow of colors, flesh ripped open in long lines. It looks like a body, yes, but nothing like hers. It's just injured meat, until Shizune prods at something and Temari's face falters, going white and pained, and suddenly it's hers after all, and someone's done this to her.

He loosens the punishing grip around her fingers, stroking them instead, a motion to calm him down as much as her.

He isn't certain how much time has passed when Kankurou strides in, trailing sand and anger, but Shizune's looking a little strained and Temari has stopped attempting to converse with him.

"Shit," Kankurou says tiredly, wiping sweat and makeup off his forehead, looking sick. "Temari. Oh shit." He fixes his eyes on Shikamaru, clear beetle-bright eyes with wrinkles around them from squinting at the sun, and from worrying, during recent months. "You'll be taking her back with you."

"He will not," Temari contradicts, voice steely around the obvious pain. "We've had this conversation already, Kankurou."

"We have," her brother admits, "and my arguments are no less convincing than they were last time I aired them. Come on, Temari. Someone has to survive this."

"I am a ninja of the Hidden Village of Sand. My place is here."

"Your place is where it's of most use to the village, wouldn't you say? This is war, it's already degenerating, and in this condition you won't be much help."

"I will be getting better. We will need everyone we have before this is resolved!"

"Think about it," Kankurou says, calmer now, conviction lacing his tired voice. "You're the one who's got good reason to go – you're hurt and you can represent us in Leaf. You even have a boyfriend there. You have something to leave for." Lackluster nod at Shikamaru, with only a very little of the cynicism that normally accompanies all his references to the Nara. "If we win you can come back, and will have saved us the alliance. If we fail – well, it'll be good to have someone sensible left."

Her eyes are glossy with something – not tears, not on Temari.

"What will you do?" she asks. "About – Gaara."

"Honesty?" Kankurou closes his eyes for a moment, rolling shoulders that creak alarmingly. "I've no idea."

"Oh," she says, whether in reply or because Shizune appears to be pulling bone right under the soothing glow of healing chakra. "I'll be back in time to save your asses. Count on it."

"I will." And there's a grin after all, fierce as family.

If she weren't his girlfriend, and terribly hurt, and holding his hand, Shikamaru would have been out of there with a rather brisk lazy saunter: in front of strangers you don't hug your sibling, or cry, or whisper heated promises. You limit yourself to a smile and all the meanings carried by locked gazes and long years together in the past.

He looks blandly at the ceiling to offer them at least a semblance of privacy, occupies himself with the information he's gleaned, that even the elder Kazekage siblings are not certain whether to fight for or against the Ichibi carrier.

He's decided to recommend Tsunade do not let this information slip to Naruto when they pack up two days later, starting for home. Temari snarks at him a little and kisses his cheek. Kankurou corners them on the outskirts of the village.

He looks aged and world-wise: the look of the competent solider, a competent commander who is a bit but only a bit on the road to becoming just another mad listless killer. Who still thinks he has something to fight for.

And maybe he does.

"Take care of her," he says.

Shikamaru knows he should say yes, it's what's expected, the tactful thing, the smart thing. He also knows, they both know, that Temari is the one of them who least needs someone to take care of her.

He says, "I'll try."

Leaves the desert with Shizune, still hardly speaking, busy calculating facts and reluctantly memorizing the exact bruised shades of Temari's skin. Goddamn Gaara anyway, he's never been more stabile than a stag on wet ice.

Has been back in Leaf for a little more than a week, and now the arrangements have been finalized and the distance traveled, rather more slowly than usual, and she's here. To live with him, for the foreseeable future. Jesus Christ.

"Here we are," he says at length with mixed relief (not much longer to carry the godawful backbreaking stuff, not much longer until he needs to find the right words. he's never cared to find any words wrong before her).

It's a modest apartment on the second floor of an acceptably cheap building, not a bad neighborhood though without any fancy pretenses, this far furnished only with necessities. His family and Temari… don't exactly get along, and if this is long-term he wants her close and away from them. He's been thinking about moving out for a while anyway.

"My," Temari says airily, dumping her packs on a chair and seeing the guard to the door. "Isn't this the typical residence of a wealthy gentleman of leisure?"

"I always thought of it more as the modest home of an overworked Chuunin and his girlfriend, myself," Shikamaru replies, groaning with relief as he's freed from the backbreaking burden but looking up in time to catch her smile, and the stained lines of her face. "Look," he says, shuffling his feet awkwardly. "You'll be back, eventually. And you're helping them out being here too. There's no reason to think there'll be a disaster."

"Of course not," she snaps. "No reason at all except for Gaara failing, lack of Kazekage, and factions of Sand ninja preparing to kill each other!" She rubs tiredly at her face. "You're right, though. No point going on about it. How d'you handle the Naruto situation? It always seemed so peaceful, in comparison."

Shikamaru shrugs a very little. "Not everyone knew," he says, "and what you don't know… More importantly, the seals are fundamentally different in design – Gaara's is supposed to leak, unsurprisingly since the very idea was for Ichibi to be useful to the village, and in order to be it has to have access to the outside world. Kyuubi was only meant to be sealed away, as deeply and permanently as at all possible. Which is why Naruto can sleep with no fear of being possessed and Gaara can barely close his eyes."

"That's really rather unfair," she remarks neutrally, sinking down in a chair. "You don't reckon it'd be possible to redo Gaara's seal?"

"I'm no expert in the field," he admits. "But I doubt it. It took a genius' death and a miracle to fix Naruto's, and Ichibi would likely take the opportunity to try and break out."

"Figures."

"Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about something to do with Naruto." He hesitates, looking her over critically, estimating freedom of moment, trying to calculate her probable chakra levels.

"Yes?"

"He's been – darker, lately. When Uchiha finally deigned to return to the village – I'm sure you've heard about that? Yeah, 's what I thought. So, Uchiha's back and they've shacked up. Needless to say that means endless fighting, and the Kyuubi seal isn't what it was. Halfway released, in fact, and Naruto's been snapping all over the place – beat Sasuke apart, knocked out the villagers turning on him. Tsunade-sama's been sending the two of them on A-ranks, and they've come back successful and unhurt and bloody as all hell. Now she's trying to reintegrate Naruto into the village, and she's stuck me on a another A-rank with him, says I'm pretty much free to pick up additional team members. How well are you?"

"Not a lot of stamina," she admits. "But short-term I'm not much worse than ever. If I let Shizune-san take another look I might be better."

The calculation is brief. With Naruto's endless chakra and stupid stubbornness, more stamina isn't what they need – so long as she can defend herself adequately upon immediate attack they should be fine. And she's used to the peculiarities of sealed Tailed Demons and their carriers, she'll keep them all calm and responsible.

"You up for coming with us? We'll be leaving tomorrow, I think."

She smiles a little, brighter now, if not by much. "Sure."

The evening is calm, the sort of quiet that comes between the storms. They put things away haphazardly and have take out for dinner, sleep for the first time in the new bed that's only just large enough for two – beds aren't cheap, and it seems the wider they are the more they cost. At least it's good incentive not to get fat.

Temari clings to him more than usual during sex, but not much so, and when he slips from sleep it's his arms tight around her.

She's quick to wake up, always has been; Shikamaru nurses some theories it has to do with the desert sun and how it's impossible to escape being woken by it at ungodly hours year round.

"Breakfast?" she asks, standing over the bed with a pot of tea in one hand, tempting his senses to wakefulness by the smell from it and the mild, arch tone of her voice.

He grumbles something, rolls out of bed; not much later they are on their way to Naruto's.

"Is he at home?" Temari asks. "I mean, the Hokage didn't call him in to brief him or anything?"

"Nah," Shikamaru says, hiding his discomfort with a shrug as best as he's able: they are fast approaching the Uchiha Compound. "I reckon he's only just back from his last mission, and she's a lazy bitch as far as she can get away with it. Facing off with the Murder Bunnies will be my job."

"Murder bunnies?" She sounds reasonably amused, a little curios. Doesn't take his hand.

"I'd hate to think of who does their laundry, particularly post mission with the liters of blood they're drenched in" Shikamaru says. "And you know what bunnies are famous for."

"Oh, dear." She's perfected sardonic intonation.

He's proud.

Through Ino he has heard Sakura's directions to the correct house, and it is not a long walk until they spot it. At approximately the point the dwelling becomes visible, so does an orange streak ghosting furiously fast over the roofs.

Two steps more, and Temari brushes a hand against his arm: flicking his gaze over the scene, Shikamaru discovers Naruto is not the only inhabitant present. Whether alarmed by the blond's hasty return or their coming, Sasuke too has ventured outside.

Shikamaru stays still, listening and watching, Temari's arm warm against his side. Considering the angles of the neighboring houses and the residents' evident preoccupation with each other, it is reasonable to assume he and Temari will not be immediately noticed.

Naruto is all blood-stained and terribly eager, one hand trembling it's way around Sasuke's back

(once, on a mission close to a desert land during the span of the three lost years, naruto meets a kid, and he is small and dark-haired and snotty, and nothing at all like sasuke. it isn't impossible to picture sasuke crying or raging or utterly impossible with people, but sasuke is always himself. not meaninglessly empty, to be filled with something. by someone.

and maybe naruto thinks, or doesn't think, why not by me?

just as well, all of it, because naruto is afraid of that which is too much like sasuke.

trust me, he says, because sasuke never did.

i'll protect you, he says, because sasuke never let him try.

remember me, he says. make me promises and keep them. i'll always be there for you, be here for me, always stay mine, always.

and it's not fair at all because it isn't the kid he's talking to, and sasuke can't hear him.

but what is fair, right, so naruto rages at the kid, and cries for him and crushes him close – saves him in all the ways a man can save another, and the kid says all the things naruto wants to hear, and really it should mean something)

and his other hand goes up to curve around Sasuke's neck, and with no uncertainty or diffidence at all he lifts the Uchiha's face and kisses the sullen mouth.

It's definitely the kind of kiss Shikamaru considers gravely unfit to be performed in public.

Especially with how the offending party is crowding Sasuke, pressing them up against each other, clinging hands sliding fast and efficiently underneath cloth.

Obviously Sasuke shares Shikamaru's belief that this is a slightly overenthusiastic greeting, squirming uncomfortably in Naruto's grip, pushing an elbow into a shoulder hidden beneath blood-stained orange fabric.

"Hey," he protests, gruff. "Get off. Naruto, idiot, what are you…!" Thankfully he sounds annoyed, not angry (or scared, because shikamaru talks to ino who talks to sakura who has access to all the hospital files, and too often this means he knows things he doesn't want to be aware of).

Naruto is clearly reluctant to abort his current occupation, and has plainly learned which spots to attack, economical movements placing his hands and mouth at areas that have Sasuke squirm. Lips opening and closing over a certain part of his neck, the barely discernable movement of a hand under his shirt.

Discomfort stark in every visible line of his body, Sasuke abandons the muffled litany of mild protests and insults, and barks at Naruto in no uncertain terms to bloody well stop it this instant.

Naruto pauses, frame tense but still, abandoning his occupation with Sasuke's throat and the marks Shikamaru knows are there though he can't see them, looks up into Sasuke's face with strained, silent intensity.

Shikamaru finds with unsurprised horror that he can _see_ Sasuke growing – resigned, more than aroused: the tightening of his shoulders, the subtle change of his stance, the loose grace of his neck.

Clearly Naruto can as well, because he isn't still anymore, and though Sasuke continues to offer an occasional grumble and doesn't much participate he doesn't stop Naruto pushing clothes away and lifting him to rest between Naruto and the wall.

The movements are faster now, fractured and frantic, feverish: Shikamaru adverts his eyes from aligning hips and bare thighs to focus on Sasuke's flushed, disinterested face, visible above Naruto's shoulder. Just seconds later, two or three rough thrusts, and Naruto's shuddering, and Shikamaru wonders, do I have the energy to feel like a peeping tom? Nah.

Naruto's hands are on the Uchiha still, brushing light marks over hips and waist, and Sasuke turns to look the blond in the face, not bothering to unhook his legs from around Naruto's middle. Lets Naruto's hands settle on his stomach, palms reverent against the still very modest swell of it, which for some reason makes Naruto's face glow, alight with life for the first time since he appeared (since before valley at the end, as far as shikamaru recalls).

"It was terrible," Naruto says in a rushed, hoarse voice, "really, really horrible, and some of them were barely more than children and there was so much blood but I did it because you do your missions or you're thrown away and they were evil and with Kyuubi this free all the murder seems just natural and that makes it worse, afterwards, and at least usually you're there and there can be the knowledge of having someone at my back, that absolute trust, someone to drown the horror in, but it was gone and there was just me and Kyuubi and the corpses." He's panting, now.

Sasuke makes a small, fast movement – Shikamaru isn't sure whether it's a startle or a shudder or just an attempt to move into a more comfortable position, what with how he's still crushed into Naruto. Still, as far as Shikamaru understands, has Naruto inside him, and really, he did not need that thought.

"I thought Tsunade kept you away from the grisly ones," he says eventually, careful, a nail tracing a whisker scar.

"Well," Naruto says on an exhalation that isn't at all a weak laugh, resting his face against Sasuke's. "Not this time."

"And there you were, all alone with no one but the corpses to slake your horniness."

Naruto looks like he's been slapped, as well he might. What he says, though, instead of the utter enraged denial Shikamaru was rather hoping for, is, "Like you aren't the same! We usually do it practically rolling in the blood."

It is at this point that Shikamaru starts pondering how one might easiest blind one's mind's eye.

"That's not what it's about," Sasuke says, sounding, shockingly and mercifully, honestly perplexed.

(but again, shikamaru talks to ino who talks to sakura who reads hospital files, and he can hardly help drawing some deeply disturbing conclusion: _it's about the thrill of the kill making me feel strong enough to dare want you_)

Sasuke's face goes from nonplussed to vexed in a handful seconds, setting a new record time in growing displeased, as he demands, "Anyway, what the hell was with your hesitation before? When I told you to stop."

(what, shikamaru wants to ask, was with you doing it even though sasuke looked like he'd rather clean a toilet than have sex with you and plainly did not enjoy it? when he was probably dry as a desert, and can my brain just die about now?)

"I guess I was kind of wondering whether it was a real no. I mean, whether you intended it as that."

If frost had a face it would look like Sasuke's does now, so cold it burns. "What exact reason do you imagine you have to believe yourself justified in ever screwing me despite my express wishes for the contrary?"

Naruto gives a kind of shrug. "No red eyes? Usually an indication in my favor."

"So," Sasuke says, silky and sweet as poison, "you will only take my disinclination to sleep with you seriously if the consequence of doing otherwise is grievous bodily harm?"

"No!" Naruto protests, more weary than vehement. "That's not what I meant. You know that."

Supposedly Sasuke must, because his hands are soft in Naruto's hair, not punching through his body.

"Hey," he mutters at length. "Let me down."

Though obviously deeply reluctant Naruto does so, and Shikamaru wisely and decently turns his gaze from any naked body parts now bared to his sight yet can't help noticing that they never stop bloody touching.

What have I done to deserve these fucking _freaks_?

xxxxxxxxxx


	28. Truth or Dare

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 28:**

"**Truth or Dare"**

"Well," Shikamaru says when the last mumble of the Murder Bunnies' voices has finally died away, when they are safely hidden inside the house. "That was exceptionally disturbing."

"Definitely," Temari agrees, her face carefully blank. "If I hadn't already walked in on Kankurou giving Gaara the Talk I'd say I'm scarred for life."

"The – Talk?" Shikamaru repeats in a voice completely inflectionless with sheer horrified glee. "With Gaara. I see."

"It was…really quite pedagogic," Temari adds with pretend casualness, and now she has to be joking. "With dolls and everything, since Gaara is supposedly not very gifted in abstract understanding of human interaction."

Her voice is carefully cold and amused when she speaks her brother's name. The name of a boy who of course needed a semi-practical demonstration because frankly he doesn't get jack shit of emotion that isn't pounded into his thick head. Shikamaru has never been quite certain whether the redhead is a psychopath or a sociopath, but the grave mental damage has always come through loud and clear.

"I want you to know," he says, lightly too, speaking gingerly, "that come what may, you have put your mark on me for always with that sentence."

They go collect Naruto shortly afterwards, hoping to high heaven they are not about to interrupt anything. As it turns out, in a turnabout so abrupt it becomes absurd all by itself, the scene is domestic: Naruto is drying his hands, presumably after washing off the blood, eagerly looking over the shelves in search of late breakfast. Sasuke's – making tea.

"Excuse the intrusion," Shikamaru says, politely calling attention with his lazy drawl.

Naruto turns towards them, presenting a surprised but glad expression painted over weary features and darkened eyes; Sasuke, already facing the doorway, doesn't move.

"Shikamaru," Naruto says. "Temari-san." He does blush a little at the second name, which is – is more than Shikamaru had dared count on, actually. The worst of the probable prospects to be considered left Naruto too far removed from the wedding and the awkward bet to be still in any way affected by them, but there you have it. There's blood under his nails and the famous light in his eyes has dimmed considerably, but he's still…reachable. Shikamaru hopes (you'd better be).

Even though Shikamaru keeps his eyes open, and knew Naruto has stopped smiling and stopped talking even before he saw what he saw today, just outside.

"Naruto," Temari smiles, winks. "Uchiha."

Naruto doesn't react this time, possibly because he's lifting a cup of tea; Sasuke nods curtly.

"We're here regarding a mission," Shikamaru discloses with an apologetic shrug. "Had assumed you'd come back yesterday, in fact. Tsunade-sama instructed me to bring you and Temari along on this A-rank as soon as possible."

And fucking Murphy strikes again, because shouldn't that very ranking excuse him from the misery? Shouldn't he get some benefits from not being technically qualified for it, the sole Chuunin in the group he's ironically expected to lead and coordinate?

'Should' really ought to matter more.

"Right," Naruto says, slumping into dejection. Of course, he can't have slept for quite a while. Nevertheless he simply reaches for some bread and starts stuffing his face in the most efficient manner possible. "What kind of equipment?"

"Nothing fancy," Shikamaru says. "As far as A-ranks go, this one looks pretty soft. We won't be long."

"Great," Naruto says, or rather mumbles around a mouthful of food. Turns to Sasuke as he swallows, and Shikamaru has the tactile impression of being ignored so completely he feels he hardly exists (a wonder naruto turned out as alright as he did, with this for a childhood). "What'll you be up to?"

Sasuke shrugs a little, sipping his tea. "Nothing much. I'm not going on an A-rank alone, and I'm not teaming up with incompetents." The quick brush of a hand against his stomach seems very unconscious.

Wise decision, though, and with Naruto and Kakashi both otherwise occupied Shikamaru assumes that that leaves Sasuke with some easy jobs – a conclusion Naruto shares, judging by his lightened smile.

"Yeah," he mock-grumbles. "Some of us can afford to be lazy."

Sasuke shrugs again. "You know where the money's kept."

Naruto looks like he's been clubbed over the head with an impossible insight.

"Are you almost ready?" Temari asks, apparently agreeing that the interesting points that come with being stuck in this nuthouse are fast ceasing to be worth exposure to the madness.

Naruto nods, stuffing the remnants of the bread into his mouth and collecting his stuff.

"Bye, then," he says to Sasuke, and Shikamaru averts his eye from the blatant display of emotion, so much more intimate than the earlier sex.

Sasuke mutters something, offers a mean smirk and splutters furiously when Naruto presses a chaste kiss to his mouth.

The three of them walk briskly without speaking, Naruto an uncomfortable, glaringly orange presence between Shikamaru and Temari. Enough so that it is mostly a relief to reach his team waiting at the village gates.

Naruto and Temari both step back – Shikamaru had not expected decorum from Naruto, but assumes the blond has learned at last that people aren't nice.

"Take care," Ino says, and hugs him.

"Yeah," Chouji agrees, patting his arm.

"I'll be fine," Shikamaru assures them breezily. "I've got good backup."

"Let's hope so," says Ino, quite ostensibly not looking at the pair who'll go with him.

She's never liked Temari, he knows. Supposes it's not surprising: Temari is older, stronger, richer. Has connections and experience, expertise. Is the young and blond and pretty master kunoichi Ino's always wanted to be.

Shortly they are off, moving through the forest landscape, Temari quite obviously making an effort to slow down in order to save her resources and taking up the rear, Naruto barely visible far ahead of them.

It's a strange trip in many ways, equally as disturbing as the scene they walked into in the Compound.

When they fight Naruto kills, Shikamaru telling him roughly what to do beforehand and Temari reluctantly hanging back in even more reluctant awe.

Because Naruto moves with an entirely feral grace that goes completely beyond the scope of human comprehension, smooth and primitive as instinct. His are the movements of a demon god. Of a damaged child.

He clearly steels himself afterwards, reluctant to look at the corpses Shikamaru studies for details, checks the pockets and packs of.

Killing isn't immoral, anymore, by Naruto's hands. It's apparent enough his power has gone beyond morality.

Temari and he talk but little – she studies him discreetly, taught irreversibly by her Gaara experiences that jokes and sarcasm and even dryly witty companionship are not suitable methods for communication with carriers of the Tailed Demons. There can be only apprehension, all the unsaid words.

"How's Gaara?" Naruto asks once, and she hurries to assure him that he needs not worry about it.

Shikamaru speaks to him rather more often, and every time he wishes he hadn't.

"You're not so good at taking a hint, huh?" he says one evening when they are gathering wood for a fire. "That's called date rape, what you did."

Naruto's look at him goes from startled to sardonic in very little time. "If you saw that you must've noticed he wasn't exactly trying to stop me."

"Elbowing someone and telling them to quit it usually count as trying to stop them," Shikamaru contradicts, not letting his voice rise.

Naruto gives a bitter little sound that falls somewhere between a snort and a short laugh. "If you think of that as trying to stop someone then it's obvious you don't know Sasuke."

"Look," Shikamaru says, pushing twigs out of his way. "It was plain enough he didn't much like it."

"He wouldn't have let me if he disliked it." The 'obviously' is quite clearly implied.

"So," Shikamaru says, allowing his brow to furrow, "as long as he doesn't actively and violently mind it's fine by you, even though he doesn't actually want to?"

Naruto stops in his tracks for a moment. "Do you have a problem with Sasuke's and my relationship, Shikamaru?"

"No," Shikamaru says lightly. "I think you do, though."

Another time, whether in a continuation of this conversation or as a new one, Naruto tells him that, "No doesn't always mean no, with Sasuke."

"Yes always means yes though, I take it?" Shikamaru replies with scorn.

Naruto looks at him as though he were the genius and Shikamaru the retard. "Are you stupid or something? Of course _not_."

Shikamaru glumly supposes that that has to count as a relief.

He still announces in frustration, a day later, as part of another argument: "Naruto. How the hell is it that you can't see there's something fundamentally wrong with a relationship in which you beat your girlfriend so badly you put her in the hospital and sleeps with her when she tells you to stay the hell away from her?"

"Sasuke's not my girlfriend."

He is, however, pregnant, which prompts Shikamaru to demand on a different occasion: "You do know who the father is, right?"

"No," Naruto says, and forestalls Shikamaru's reply by adding: "I don't want to hear that, not from you."

Why does Naruto's honorable streak always latch on to the inconvenient things? How is domestic violence alright but receiving important information from outside sources is not?

"You don't get that you're letting people down?" Shikamaru rages at him, in so far as Shikamaru does rage.

Naruto, who does overblown drama much better with his face twisted and dark, instantly cries back, "He let me down first!"

Shikamaru abandons all outward emotional displays, clings to lethargic disgust with the world's frustrating stupidity. "So now there are punishment issues as well in your sex life, in addition to the obvious tendencies towards violence and unhealthy possessiveness? How nice."

"It's not as though sex is some sphere separate from our normal lives," Naruto says. "What's there's there. Anyway, I missed the part which made any of this your business."

When next they touch upon the issue he's short and immediate, filled with self-righteous anger all the sharper for the underlying shame: "It's not like Sasuke's being nice to me!"

_Let's see – betraying you, cheating on you, lying to you, beating you up, giving you a Tsukiyomi, treating you like you're not worth his attention much of them time. No, guess he's not. What a shocker, because didn't we all expect that little ray of sunshine to grow up a caring and well adjusted man?_

"That's what I expect from a traitor," Shikamaru tells him. "I thought better of you."

Naruto has nothing to say to that.

Two days before they reach Leaf Shikamaru calculates he will allow himself to snap, and summarizes his findings: "It'd be real easy to attribute this exceptionally crude method of communication to the fact you have the vocabulary and Sasuke the emotional maturity of a developmentally stunted toddler, but I don't think it's about that at all. I think it's about how you didn't take a no when it counted, which neither of you are prepared to psychologically admit to, and which behavior you are now trying to normalize. Just thought you should know."

Because he's turning his back on this now.

Naruto's mouth opens and closes, his face goes white, and they do not speak again.

xxxxx

After Naruto has left everything is very calm. Sasuke drinks his tea and washes the dishes. Gets his space and can't help doing some thinking.

The last of which means things are more – realistic, if not necessarily more harmonic, even when the blond's back.

The return itself is a climax, though – how could it not be? Naruto is Naruto, and Sasuke is Sasuke, and they are what they are to each other. Explosive, reaching too deeply.

Sasuke has just seen Tsunade, given the required clarification of how much he's willing to work at this stage. Which is a fair amount, so she should be pleased.

(it's something to do)

For as long as he can remember there has not been a time when a nigh impossible goal did not lie pressing over him, and he has never quite managed to decide how he feels without it.

First there was the need to be a genius, be the very best, because he knew it was the only way for him to survive, for him and his mother both – with snake's eyes and the pale smirk of death you don't make it far in a ninja village tense and insecure from upcoming conflicts if you are not invaluable.

So he made it through the insults that went from screamed to hushed as he sky-rocketed through the Academy, skipping year after year. Several kids did, during times of distress, when chances were they would be needed faster than they were ready, but unlike the majority of them he had objectively earned the special treatment.

And then – finally security, of a fashion. Making the prodigy team, with bitchy butch Tsunade and the idiot monkey boy Jiraiya with the monstrous brute strength, pampered by Sarutobi, the Third.

He thinks they may have been as close to being liked by him as anything ever has.

But time passed and war is – war. Blood flooded over his hands, his own and his enemies', his comrades' and his victims'. And blood's a good deal thicker than the water you try and wash it off with, in the end.

His mother died when he was fourteen, and people said it was suicide but the fact the only handprints on the kunai were her own doesn't prove much of anything, in a ninja village.

That was when it was brought into irredeemable focus, the realization that had been ghosting his thoughts for some time – that it was all meaningless. That they were all future food for the worms, nothing more than that. Living on borrowed time that always runs out.

And that was when he said, No. I'm not accepting this. I'm changing the rules, I'll cheat if I have to – I'm going to win.

Maybe he couldn't be meaningful, but he wouldn't be snuffed out. He had time, still. He'd get the forever jutsu right.

Unsurprisingly they found him out eventually, and some things happened and some did not, and he still couldn't feel, or at least didn't, but he was getting closer, all the time.

Then there was the other beginning – knowing since almost the moment he could know things that there was Itachi. A goal, a challenge, an ultimatum.

One that turned out badly, and there was so much blood and so many endings and only one way forward and no way out.

Pursuing that madly, being mad, and then that ended too.

With more blood, Itachi's this time, and seed.

Finally another kind of finish, when the main characters of both these lives abruptly ceased to be.

Leaving him here, growing heavy with child, making his way from the Hokage Tower, inside which he's told Tsunade he's fine working as long as he's at all able. Won't take unnecessary risks, of course, but he doesn't mind low ranked missions.

(_it's something to do_)

Naruto corners him on a sunny street, whiskered cheeks coloring from what must be upset rather than exertion in a face more pallid than it ought to be. The eyes are too large, too dark.

Too much like my own when I stare back.

Under curious, judgmental stares Naruto grabs onto him, breathes hot flushed pants into his face.

"When you said you didn't remember," Naruto says, and his lips are trembling around the words racing each other horrified and inevitable over his tongue, "about what happened outside the inn – did you really not? Did I…" He bites his lip, looking furious and on the verge of crying. "I mean I remember doing it, but I also remembering killing you and I don't know what's real anymore!"

Sasuke wants to kill him to shut him up. His mind is a fog, red darkness eating the world.

"Shut up," he hisses. "Don't talk about that. I can't remember that!"

"Sasuke! If you're scared to remember – doesn't that mean I did?"

His voice is rising in fear now. The spectators can probably hear what he's saying.

"I don't _know_!" Sasuke roars back. He's very, very carefully not letting himself know. "Why are you asking? No really, say you didn't – fine, that's one hurdle cleared, and we'll always remember we both thought you could've. Or say that you, that you did. What does that change? Why do we want to try and deal with that if we don't have to?"

"I," Naruto starts, then exhales. "Yeah, alright." The relief is palpable, though unease does not entirely leave him.

"And I'm not _scared_," Sasuke sneers, even though he can't remember being this frightened. Not this version of him.

They very empathically do not need an audience, so he grabs Naruto's wrist roughly and hauls him off. The demon chakra is extremely immediate beside him, the child's weak inside him, and his mind is crowded with everything he absolutely won't remember (massacre night valley at the end the merging itachi's death when naruto broke and broke us both).

I hate being pregnant, want my other body back, the independence I can feel at home in.

It churns through him, leaving him desperate enough for distraction to hazard a bad-tempered inquiry about the mission.

"Yeah," Naruto says, walking too close, brushing against Sasuke's side. "It wasn't so bad, mission-wise. Just, Shikamaru was really aggressive, for being him, about us having a sick and twisted relationship."

Sasuke isn't listening. "Really?"

"Mmh," Naruto shrugs, clearly too disturbed by the subject to simply let it go. "He thinks, um, he thinks I'm date raping you and like, abusing you and stuff."

"Imagine that," Sasuke mutters. "Stupid voyeur asshole."

"You could, like, say he's wrong," Naruto prompts plaintively, clearly growing increasingly uncomfortable. "Anytime now."

Sasuke startles, his insides clenching painfully. He says, voice tight and light, "How could you date rape me when we've never been on a date, idiot?"

Technically Naruto shouldn't be able to coerce him into anything, because Sasuke should stop him. Things are just never that simple: isn't every intimacy a degree of violation? He doesn't think Naruto's any surer about where to draw the lines than he is (if you say no but mean yes? if you say yes but mean no? if you don't care anymore?).

I do know I want Naruto, much of the time, in different ways.

(that is what he feels the keenest, worst violation of them all)

"Yeah. Right." And Naruto's smile is pure relief. "So, wanna go on a date, then?"

Sasuke gives him a quelling, incredulous stare.

Naruto shrugs, brilliant smile rather brittle. "You were right we never have. And I figure, we've got some time, yeah? So why not?"

"Sure," Sasuke says shortly, lets Naruto chatter on and drag him away to the ramen stand for a late lunch. Classy.

It's obvious enough Sasuke doesn't much listen, but given the kind of shit Naruto's sprouting that might not be entirely disadvantageous. It's enough that he's here, warm against Naruto's side, with a little bit of a smirk every now and then. With a knee bony against Naruto's own, and a shoulder and a hip, the last of which is finally starting to fill out, if only a little. Still, he can't help thinking with a suppressed wince that designing the female body with boyish proportions will turn out to have been a Bad Mistake when the kid decides it wants out.

Between his second and third helping he realizes he doesn't know how a date is supposed to be done, doesn't think Sasuke does either, and gets the bright idea they should play Truth or Dare.

"Truth or Dare?" Sasuke repeats skeptically, and for a moment Naruto is certain he will have to explain the concept, but then Sasuke adds, "Most of us outgrew that game when we were about seven."

"You've played it?" Obviously, but the surprise merits an exclamation. Then again he supposes Sasuke was pretty normal, all things considered, before Massacre Night, and certainly Sasuke would not have encountered any trouble finding playmates.

"Once or twice," Sasuke admits reluctantly.

"Really? Cool."

Deadpan, with just a hint of a smirk to ruin the innocent expression, Sasuke asks, "Did you know Jiraiya used to have a crush on Tsunade's mother?"

"No," Naruto says pathetically. "And I was quite happy not to." Jeez, talk about unwanted information. Still, after another few mouthfuls of soothing ramen he adds, "Then we can play."

"Has anyone ever told you that you have the maturity of a grade schooler?" Sasuke snorts. Grade school is when you generally learn the truth jutsu, and Truth or Dare has always been a popular way to train it – evidently even the Sannin practiced it. "Fine, whatever."

"Great," Naruto announces smugly. "So, um, let's see, the consequence when you don't want to answer my questions anymore will be – you'll have to propose to Jiraiya. In public. Giving the impression you actually want to."

Sasuke looks predictably disgusted. "You do realize he'd probably figure it was Orochimaru talking and accept in a misguided attempt to heal me?"

"Oh, _gross_."

"Anyway, why are we playing by the girl rules?"

"Girl rules? These are the ones Sakura-chan taught me."

"Figures. Your consequence will be…" Spiteful is a good/bad/terrifying look on Sasuke, chasing shivers up and down Naruto's spine. "When you tire of answering questions you will go have a little chat with the Third's brat. Tell him you've given up on your Hokage quest in order to concentrate on your career as a child murderer. Make him believe it."

The truth jutsu is fast done away with, leaving an unpleasant tingling in his skull.

"Prepare yourself," Naruto warns, deciding he should get to start since it was his idea. Hmm, didn't Sakura-chan say there was a standard opening phrase? Oh, yeah… "Here goes. First question: who was your first crush?"

"Sarutobi-sensei."

"Huh? Look, I was talking to _you._ Fine, as you want it, about _Sasuke_."

"I'll remember." They both know the rules stipulate that the same question can't be asked twice.

Sasuke has replied, and Naruto wants as much as possible answered before Sasuke breaks and it's his time to be humiliated, but he needs to think, needs to gather his thoughts.

"Who'd you play this with?"

It would seem an almost ridiculously innocent inquiry, but Sasuke's face smoothes out into expressionlessness.

"Itachi."

"Shit! What did _you_ talk about?"

Proposing to Jiraiya is apparently worse by a narrow margin (humiliation levels equal, one horror public and the other not). Naruto realizes Sasuke was seriously considering the other option only when the Uchiha is already speaking, with an ironic air that makes it none the less obvious the words fairly burn his mouth.

"I asked him whether he still liked me now he had Shisui for his best friend. He said I was a silly child, and I thought that meant he didn't want to be around me anymore, but then he said I was silly for ever doubting that, and that I'd always be what he cared about the most."

The punishment for being careless, for underestimating Naruto, is as bitter as deserved.

"Ah," Naruto says uncertainly, reaching for his hand, in plain understanding things have gone too far (sasuke moves it without looking at him). There is no regret in me, though.

His moves are quicker than usual when he forms the few seals necessary, presses coarse fingers to Sasuke's forehead to release the truth jutsu.

His grin is lopsided as he turns back to his ramen, eventually remarking, "That was three questions. Wanna ask me?"

"Not really." He rises, pushing the empty bowl away from him and dropping a modest heap of money on the counter to pay for it.

He is half a district away when Naruto catches up to him, jogging steps hitting gravel and splashing water behind him. Sasuke contemplates increasing his speed but decides he has been quite childish enough today.

"Hey," Naruto calls, level with him in another step. "Wait up, would you? Look, sorry, but you agreed to the damn game."

"I am quite aware of that."

"So, then," Naruto says when they've walked a in silence for a bit. "Been seeing Kakashi?"

"I'm not blind."

Naruto looks hard, jaw clenched. "I still have questions left. Too chicken to answer them? How would you feel if I slept with someone else?"

He is _not_ chicken and perhaps he owes Naruto a bit of bitch-slapping truth.

"I don't know," he says, still walking, looking steadily forward. Fascinating buildings to see. "If you didn't care about them I guess I wouldn't care either. Least so long as you kept clean of venereal diseases. If you did care about them I suppose I would – kill them and beat you up."

(and watch the fundament of the world rock asunder under his feet, and realize life was mostly over)

(shut _up_)

"You wouldn't be happy about it," Naruto summarizes. "Yeah well, neither am I."

Sasuke does stop now, mainly because he had no idea where he was going anyway, and this is getting ridiculous, and why can't we just _stop_?

"Last I saw Kakashi," he says, fixing his gaze on Naruto's chin, "Anko was chatting him up."

(_you're doing this for the wrong reasons)_

_(do you even know why you're doing this?_

_(this isn't fair to you_)

xxxxxxxxxx


	29. Blind Spot

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 29:**

"**Blind Spot"**

Naruto's face is aching around a smile when Sasuke abruptly lifts his head, looking over Naruto's shoulder: turning, Naruto discovers that one of the chakra signs he's been ignoring belongs to a tall ANBU guy who sketches a bow Sasuke's way before focusing on Naruto.

"Uzumaki," he says, sounding faintly pissed off. "The Hokage wants to see you."

"What? Now? But Shikamaru said he was gonna file the report."

The ANBU does not deign to reply, merely continues to keep the mask facing his way until Naruto shrugs and figures it's best to get whatever it is out of the way as fast as possible.

His hands are reluctant to release Sasuke's, cling forlorn with possessive gaiety to chalky wrists and palms and fingers. "I'll be back soon," he says, as though Sasuke has asked (has realized the change from dark to gold does not mean sasuke's eyes have stopped asking for things, though he still isn't always sure which those things are) and follows the ANBU across the village.

"Old hag," he greets, stepping bravely into the familiar office. Shit, he spent a considerable part of his childhood here, being scolded and informed that unfortunately we've found no one who can stand having anything to do with you. For the first time he realizes the Third must've known quite well who his parents were.

("does it matter to you?" sasuke asked him, contemplatively, sketching a figure on his chest with his breath. "who they were? knowing about them?"

"i don't think so," naruto said. "i mean the irony is whoa, but overall it's in the past. it's nothing to do with _me_.")

"Naruto." Tsunade looks serious, the customary smile she always gives him lined with worry. "I just spoke to Shikamaru about the mission. It left me – concerned."

"Why? None of us were even close to getting done in."

"Look," she says. "Frankly I couldn't care less if Uchiha gets himself beaten up and raped most every day. God knows he's deserved it, and it certainly wouldn't surprise me if the little shit gets off on it. I'm less laissez-faire about you doing it. Think, Naruto, don't do anything you'll wind up regretting. You're better than this."

He feels doused in cold water. Shikamaru was one thing, but this…

"For the last time," he rasps out, "I do not rape Sasuke! I never will rape Sasuke, I have no interest in it, why would I even fucking _need_ to!"

Tsunade raises an eyebrow. "Shikamaru is not the only one who's remarked your boyfriend seems rather banged up most of the time."

"Because we _fight_! I usually look worse, until Kyuubi's healing kicks in!"

"Alright," she says, and he doesn't know whether she means, _Alright I believe you_ or _Alright, he's not worth it, beat him up all you like._

He admits a hollow laugh. "How come everyone's accusing me of abusing Sasuke? Why's no one bothered to, I don't know, _ask him_? Why's no one calling Kakashi on what _he_ did?"

Tsunade's smile is the antithesis of reassuring. "I think everyone here knows Sasuke well enough to be aware he'd rather die than admit to being victimized. As for Kakashi, he didn't leave witnesses."

"That's all this is about, huh?" The utterance is too defeated to be a snort, too angry to be an exhalation. "Official policy. A respected jounin takes advantage of a little kid but just a handful people know, no problem. Demon host leaves a few marks after defending his own life, let's all assume he's a crazy sadist. Sure, that's fair."

"You did beat the shit out of him, Naruto," Tsunade reminds him. "Had Jiraiya and Shizune been half an hour later, he'd have died."

Naruto swallows dryly.

"Don't think I'm immune to hearing he deserved it," Tsunade adds, carelessly cruel. "Just don't pretend you're innocent."

"And you are?"

"Of course not," she sighs. "Nor is Sasuke, or Kakashi, or anyone. It comes with being human."

He's apprehensive and pissed off and ashamed when he comes home, after some time spent demolishing training grounds because Sasuke's far enough gone that taijutsu is a bad idea and ninjutsu and genjutsu would level the Compound if they let loose.

Sasuke takes one look at him and catches his face between rough palms. "Stop caring, idiot. They don't fucking matter."

Naruto mumbles into his ear, moving slowly, touching softly. For once Sasuke allows, has little choice but to allow, a thorough exploration of his anatomy, and Naruto whispers discovery over his skin. The most famous scars are situated on his neck, but they have siblings all over his body. Sasuke's hands are lattice-works of minimal white spots and thin lines, barely visible even to the searching eye: proof he was not always proficient with a kunai or a shuriken. Two strangely shimmering lines, like moon-pale oil, slither up his back, curving along his shoulder-blades, from the wings. Marks from wire along his upper arms, from teeth on his left ear, a large splotch of discolored skin below his right breast from Naruto's Rasengan.

Naruto of course has no marks at all save the seal and the whisker scars, which might be the equivalent of belated birth marks more than anything else. Or – below the unmarked skin there's something hidden, a scar etched into his bones, ribs having healed just a little wrongly aligned where Sasuke reached through them for what lies protected beneath them.

Sasuke wonders idly whether Naruto does not understand that he is faking or realizes and doesn't care.

I'd prefer the second, I think.

That night Naruto has the strangest dreams.

(he dreams sasuke sits up abruptly, just awakened from a nightmare, dislocating naruto's grip on him and alerting the blond.

"sasuke," he says, and it's sleepy murmur and protest and question.

sasuke says nothing but his eyes are liquid dark: not golden, not even, it gradually dawns on naruto, red. it seems perfectly natural they should be bruise-hued, black.

"it's such a strange memory," sasuke says into the still air then, a funny twist to his expression. "i remember too many versions. from in sound: i remember having it done to me, and i remember that it was…fun. remember it was agony, and remember doing it."

naruto reaches for him and the dream dissolves)

Sasuke stopped dreaming the day his eyes stopped changing back from yellow.

Naruto, who did not, dreams on.

("it is decided, then," orochimaru says.

"indeed," agrees tsunade, placing a calming and moreover pretty bone-crushing hand on jiraiya's arm.

the frog master growls, "i still hate you."

orochimaru smiles pleasantly.

"let's get it over with," tsunade says in disgust. "we've been fighting for years, it's ruining both our villages. we need to unite if we are not both to be wiped out. together we'd rule the ninja world."

"indeed," orochimaru repeats; the word is oily, pleased. he looks younger than before. "and how better to arrange a joining than by a wedding? my heir to yours."

naruto, who only now is part of the scene, abruptly thrown into it from his previous distanced observation point, finds himself standing just behind tsunade and jiraiya, staring now with helpless focus at sasuke, pallid beneath the inky hair at orochimaru's side.

sasuke looks back at him and worries at his lip, a gesture so obviously copied long ago from his then-master, and says, "alright.")

There is a last one, too, a worst one.

(he dreams he is waking up, from a red red slumber of suffocating wilderness, buried in sasuke)

Dreaming is overrated.

And then, when he has woken and thrown up and fallen asleep again, it goes on.

("sasuke!" he screams, and i've found you, i've finally gotten you back.

the lazy, wary yellow eyes remain bland. "who the hell are you?")

Bad is relative, for worse is imminent.

("naruto-niisan!" and sasuke smiles up at him, shit, he's never seen a smile like that, and it's so shy and soft, so fragile and trusting, worth anything in this world to behold.

naruto breaks it himself, painting sasuke's world red as kyuubi's rage one evening in early fall, when all the uchiha end save you and i, always the two of us)

xxxxx

Hinata likes watching Neji-san before he wakes up: these pre-dawn hours are the only times his face is readable, when the Byakugan and discipline fade enough to allow the carefully neutral expression he favors to falter into tired lines of human youth.

She does not dislike him, but this is the only time she does not mind looking at him.

She knows there are many who do not understand her decisions. Hanabi for one, and Naruto. She shies away from the second thought, because it hurts, even in the gray land she has made for herself, the cocoon she clings to gingerly, tenaciously, inside which she has no opinion, barely any emotion.

Hanabi says, when Hinata breaks and looks miserable, "You don't have to let them treat you this way."

Because, as mentioned, Hanabi does not understand. Because Hanabi has never been afraid, or unloved. Hanabi is stubborn, and strong.

She would never have understood their mother either, the mild kind woman who obviously did not know what she was getting into, marrying their father.

She wasted away, locked in the south wing of the Hyuuga Complex, disregarded and scorned the way misunderstood things are, weeping for her lost chances. Hinata suspects she was never quite alive again after the wedding; Hanabi's complicated birth was a sweet excuse to die. She never recovered from it, died three days later, missed by no one.

Not by Hinata either, because trying to take responsibility and failing was rather a painful experience, and the dead speak lower.

When Neji-san stirs she quickly averts her eyes: after almost half a year of marriage he does no longer wake up from her presence, but prolonged staring is obviously more than his sleeping mind can endure. She knows he does not like for anyone to see him without the headband covering the green (ironically, the color of healing) symbol tattooed onto his forehead (into the core of him) so kindly she turns the other way, sitting up and shrugging into a dressing gown.

The feather-light silk falls around her, curving lovingly, achingly revealingly, over her stomach, which is beginning to swell a little. To be frank she suspects she has always had an inclination towards the plump; her mother did, and though relentless training and grievances have kept her slender, she has the breasts and hips of a more generous build, at odds with the bird-bone body structures of her husband (cousin) and sister.

Personally she does not mind, and her father has taken his hand and his judgment from her. Isn't rounded shapes only what you expect of a woman whose raison d'être is to be pregnant, to give birth, to allow her body to become a container of hope, her life to be given lovingly to the next generation?

"Hinata-san?" Neji-san asks, half asleep yet, a reflexive probing of danger.

"Yes," she says. "It's only me."

The _only_ is imperative, and her husband mumbles something and falls back asleep.

It's quite natural, of course: he returned home late last night and will leave for another mission in the afternoon. He needs all the sleep he can find time for.

Hinata sighs lightly and stands up, stealing towards the door: she will not be required. Neji-san has never forced her, never raised hand or voice against her, and since it was confirmed she is pregnant he has not touched her.

She is rather grateful, which leads to accustomed feelings of vague guilt. At least I am a better wife than I ever was a daughter or an heir.

Hanabi, already sitting at the informal breakfast table in the kitchen though yawning helplessly and hugely, raises a hand in greeting and attempts a smile around her yawns.

"Hinata," she mumbles, eyes barely halfway open. Just as well: Hinata can read Byakugan eyes as well as any Hyuuga (which is marginally better than people not of the clan) but her sister's version of the Bloodline Limit, tainted dark with inbreeding and abnormal talent, features expressions that oft escape Hinata's interpretation. "Shouldn't you be resting?"

"I'm not the one who seems tired," she replies calmly, sitting down as well and reaching for a bowl of rice. "Anyway, you're leaving for an A-rank with my team; seeing you all off is the least I can do."

Hanabi smiles through her weariness, the irrepressible pride of a ten-year-old with a Jounin license, tempered with childish sadness that she now outranks her original Genin team by such a margin that she is unlikely ever to work with them again.

"Yeah," she mutters. "Isn't Neji-san leaving too, later?"

It's funny, the way Hinata misinterprets her little sister: she'd have expected the child to be severely passive-aggressive towards the new heir of the clan, but she seems to get on fine with Neji-san.

"He is," Hinata confirms.

Hanabi has never been afraid of Neji-san. She'd laugh anyone to scorn who suggested she close her eyes and think of the clan or the village while a man operated between her legs. She's been able to use the Branch Seal since she was four, but to Hinata's knowledge has only utilized it once, by mistake when she was five.

Hinata, who has yet to master it and no large interest in doing so, thinks that by all ninja standards she probably ought to be jealous that little Hanabi fights all but evenly with Neji-san, whom Hinata got exactly as close to as he let her during that Chuunin Exam long ago.

I'm not. Is that so bad?

"Since Gai-sensei and Lee-san are otherwise occupied, I believe he's going with Tenten and Uchiha Sasuke," Hinata adds, not a stranger to the interested cast to Hanabi's no longer childish feature.

"I thought they hated each other," she says, instead of: _isn't Sasuke-san farther along than you?_

"I doubt Neji-san has ever lowered himself enough to hate another person," Hinata says carefully. "And I've never had the impression Sasuke is overly concerned with anyone not of his clan or his team."

She remembers Naruto's hand on her stomach, solid and warm, bright contrast to his brittle smile. Neji-san's never touched it.

It is not the first time she is ashamed to envy Uchiha Sasuke furiously, nor does she expect it shall be the last.

"He is _so cool_," Hanabi breathes in tones too awed to be sleepy anymore – the way only slightly prepubescent children can speak. "I mean," she adds hastily, trying to recover what composure she can after Hinata's glance has stained her cheeks and neck with a blush, "the whole avenger thing, and he shouldn't have been able to do it but he did, he really did, and the tricked a Sannin and then he killed Itachi, and that fish guy too, and he's pregnant and traumatized and whatever, and he still _kicks ass_!" Obviously realizing dignity is lost to her for the present, she chances a smile and finishes, "I'm going to beat him, of course. As fast as I've given Neji-san what's coming to him."

Her earnest face is entirely without irony and she reaches for a rice bowl with a grand, sweeping gesture more suited to a dictator making public speeches than to a girl at a breakfast table and starts stuffing her face.

"Just," she says, chopsticks pausing thoughtfully a few inches from her mouth. "Shouldn't he be prosecuted?"

(tsunade has thought about that, actually. this is how it could have happened:

naruto crests the mountainside, jogging easily now, not expecting to find anything, not when the trail's so cold. but he looks down and there's sasuke, uchiha sasuke, lost dream turned nightmare.

reclining against a tree, looking up to meet his eyes.

for a long time naruto is not able to speak; later he realizes it's not a long time at all, it just feels like it, because in an instant he is down, rasengan in hand and fist angling towards sasuke.

they fight as they've fought a thousand times, and an uchiha heart is like a bloodline limit, you can't take it by force, you can't comprehend it – can treasure it, sure, the days he does, which are most but not all, but if you're not an uchiha it won't bend to you and you won't get jack shit of its inner workings. or, he knows it pumps blood and stuff, but it seems simply a cold lump, even now, when it's resting in his hand.

"i hate you," he tells sasuke, screaming it into the expressionless red-eyed face. "i hate you because i love you so goddamn much!"

the last is alright only because sasuke has already lost consciousness.

they never know whose the blood on his hands is, if it's itachi's or orochimaru's or anyone's, because sasuke isn't talking.

they put him in a cell and kakashi tries to talk to him and sakura tries to talk to him, and dozens and dozens of people stop by, staring in fear or spitting curses.

until eventually naruto realizes what has been clear to tsunade and probably to sasuke too from the very outset, from the moment his feet again trod leaf soil: that he is going to be executed.

he is guilty of all but innocence, and they are going to sentence him to death or force him to kill himself.

or rather they _would have_, because the day naruto understands this he goes to the holding cell, and because it'll be the last time he is let in, and he grabs sasuke through the bars, and sneers, growls, sobs, "_i am not going to lose you again._"

and he fists sasuke's neck hard enough to draw blood where his nails puncture the skin of the throat, and kisses him for a bit, clumsy and brutal, before he rips the bars away.

"naruto," sasuke says, only that, lets naruto grab his hand after he's finished the seals for the kage bunshin no jutsu, and then they run.

past guards fast incapacitated, and sauske's laughing and naruto's crying and neither one is stopping or regretting)

"I think that'd be rather more complicated than it's worth," Hinata says carefully, a little amused but mostly sad.

"Yeah, I suppose," Hanabi agrees after a moment, the thoughtless impatient acquiescence of a child who should have nothing to do with A-rank missions.

"Be careful," Hinata says. Begs. "Please. Kiba can be rash, but Shino's careful, listen to him, please, Hanabi."

In the span of a moment her sister transforms from a carefree child to the spurned heir of a tainted warrior clan.

"I can handle myself," she says coldly, not so much dismissive as certain. Reassuring, much as Hinata hates to think Hanabi should be the one to administer comfort. "Anyway, are you done? Great, let's go."

She rises lithely, waits with badly concealed impatience as Hinata rather more carefully gets to her feet (their father is busy with a meeting, made his goodbyes, the pride and care and worry, last night).

The morning air is fresh and moist, a sheen of dew clinging tenaciously to the grass in a losing struggle against the warming sun. They are to meet at the usual point, beside a bunch of bunch and skeleton-leaf-trees; the path is as familiar to Hinata as the floor-beds of the dojo, as the linen of her bed.

Less expected, for they are early, is the sight of one of her teammates already present. At least she figures it must be one of them, because who else would come here and besides, she fancies she'd recognize Kiba in more trying circumstances than a bit of distance and surprise can be said to constitute. When Hanabi slows down in uncertainty beside her, however, she realizes it might not be, because the person is standing there kissing someone.

She can't think who Kiba would be kissing, nor why he'd be doing it here.

Then they are a few steps closer, because surprise moved her forward even when decency kept her Byakugan inactivated, and she discovers Kiba is definitely there, only she is not certain which one if Kiba. They both appear to be, the slim tanned boys intertwined in the shade from the trees.

The Kiba facing mostly their way notices her, then – she assumes she made an incautious move, breathed too loudly, or that her scent was carried to him on the wind.

In a matter of moments she is facing two bewildered brown-haired youths with beseeching terror written over identical olive features.

"Hinata," one of them says, while the other sort of leans into him in mutual support, creating an island on dry land, for just the two of them. "And, um. Hanabi. Morning."

"Morning," Hanabi says dryly. She, Hinata notices, has her Byakugan activated.

The Kiba who hasn't spoken makes a soft, growly sound at the sight, and that is when every single shattered piece falls into place for Hinata.

"Oh," she says. "Good morning, Akamaru."

Another sound, and she is fairly adept at translating the dog's noises after all this time – acknowledgement, relief, apprehension, all rolled into each other as they roll off his tongue, human now.

Kiba says nothing, but the tension resettling his shoulders, the strain at the corners of his eyes, are a plainer form of communication.

"It's fine, of course," Hinata says: didn't before because it did not occur to her that she might question (it hardly ever does). "I mean, I'm happy for you, if this is what you want. What you both want. That's – I'm glad."

She offers a timid smile, sees it mirrored, though distorted, by Kiba's double face: it's rougher on him, broader and grimmer and more vivid. Forceful, like every aspect of him.

Like now, when he looks at Hanabi.

Hinata says her sister's name in what might be warning or entreaty, watches the rise and dip of a hollowed shoulder as Hanabi shrugs.

"So long as you keep your molestation to the dog, I don't see how it's my problem."

Akamaru, animal again in the blink of an eye and a puff of smoke, barks in agreement.

xxxxx

Neji tells himself that he is not being pathetic as he sits down in the lotus position on a roof in the Uchiha Compound, carefully activating his Bloodline Limit and reflexively (unnecessarily) turning the right way. It isn't as though he's doing this to sneak a peek at Naruto; it's simply sound caution to investigate the situation, before the mission that Hokage-sama forced on him commences later in the afternoon.

Anyway, he can only see outlines of chakra, differences in density (though has learned to visualize, from that). And he watches, sees a faint blue glimmer around the glaring red pulse that is Naruto (is kyuubi), stretched out in bed. Thankfully Uchiha isn't with him; Neji discovers him in the kitchen, eating something from small bowl.

(he woke up slowly, some hours ago, slipped away from naruto's sleep-limp arm. wondered whether he likes or dislikes that naruto evidently does no longer feel the compulsion to hold on to him frantically through the night)

Neji watches him walk into the bedroom, sees the minimal movements of his lips as he calls, "Hey, dead-last."

Naruto rolls over and sits up, dragging Uchiha down beside him by a grip around the pale wrist.

"Morning," he mumbles, stealing a piece of something from Uchiha's bowl. "Breakfast in bed?"

"Not for you," Uchiha clarifies but doesn't object to the continued thievery. "I'm leaving soon."

Neji does not think about what it would be like to be in his place, to sit on a bed with a naked Naruto draped over his back.

"Right," Naruto says. "I thought you didn't want to work with Neji."

Uchiha shrugs, disinterested, dismissive. "At least he's competent, never mind the girl."

"Tenten," Naruto says, a ripple passing over the chakra lines sketching his face, indicating an expression too animated for Neji to properly decipher. "I've been kind of wary around her ever since I overheard her say, 'I wonder if Lee will ever get over mooning over Sakura long enough to realize he's in love with Gai-sensei'."

Shuddering, Neji cannot blame him.

Uchiha too seems faintly disgusted, but if half the rumors about him and _his_ previous teachers are true Neji does not feel he has any leeway to be judgmental.

There are more words, new movements, soft close ones, but Neji cannot bear to watch anymore. Can't bear seeing this person he has despised for three years and the one he… He has never allowed himself to clarify what exactly it is that he wants from Naruto. Isn't sure it's actually what Uchiha has, the ability to render Naruto anguished and furious and elated.

(but only because i do not allow myself to be sure)

He stands up, eyes blank and seeing no farther than any other.

When eventually all three of them assemble Neji has the taste of the Amai no Jutsu on his tongue, has the knowledge that even that was Uchiha's, really, not Neji's, and the grim satisfaction of knowing those accursed Sharingan may look upon the moves of his master technique however intently they like, because bereft of the Byakugan they are impossible, worthless.

To think he is rendered to taking pleasure in something so low and hollow as that.

(he's a genius jounin and heir of the oldest clan in leaf, married to a kind girl carrying his child, where once he thought he would be forced to maim himself so he could not conceive; could not have loved his children so little so as to give them up to the branching)

(once he was untamed, and he had a mother and a father and a hope. could say that hinata-san was cute, and it wasn't irony or fate)

He discovers now that he has never realized how short Uchiha is. Looks weak, too – muscles like rope under the grayish skin, frail bone structure, the stomach a soft swell. It's smaller than expected, for containing a five-and-a-half-month fetus, but he can see the child inside it perfectly well.

(he was on a mission with hinata-san once, just before she quit due to her pregnancy. they do not speak, they do not touch: they greet, they breed. we do not dream.

"yes, neji-san," she said. "of course, neji-san. as you say, neji-san."

he knows he can never please her, and doesn't speak. lee did, and tenten, constant gentleman babble and bitchy girl talk, and the awkwardness took neji by the hand and it was just the two of them and watching his wife, whom he has nothing to say to and who is so soft.

hanabi is so much easier, even during that one b-rank when she tagged along because they needed an additional pair of byakugan.

her resentment he can understand. if he had to marry a main house heiress, maybe it had been better if it had been her, if nothing else then for the simple devastating reason she would never have agreed to let him)

"Should you – really do this?" Tenten asks, looking uncertainly at Uchiha's unattractive and rather sickly appearance. "I mean you're…"

Neji is almost immature enough to hope she will have provoked Uchiha sufficiently that Neji will need to forcefully restrain him.

It doesn't matter how Uchiha is physically, of course, anyone with the Byakugan can see that: even if he weren't trained, had no endurance or strength or flexibility, Uchiha could run and carry and hit on chakra alone for a long time.

There are other ways to fight than taijutsu, though Neji's always suspected Uchiha is adverse to them because of his brohter's profiled excelling in genjutsu (illusion is dishonest, neji agrees, but orochimaru at least should be rather beyond dishonesty by now).

(it is fortunate i do not have any aspirations on happiness)

Working with Uchiha Sasuke turns out to be an anticlimax on par with Neji's existence at large: they do not talk to each other, do not look at each other. Even Tenten, whose name Neji suspects Uchiha has forgotten, keeps tensely, unhappily quiet.

Neji isn't unhappy, though. That's the profit of living in a gray emotional limbo.

xxxxxxxxxx


	30. Eyes on Me

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 30:**

"**Eyes on Me"**

It is not long until they are upon their targets, and just after Tenten's spotted them (which according to her estimation makes it about a kilometer and a half after neji caught sight of them) the Hyuuga Heir Apparent lifts a hand to signal halt.

"Tenten, stay hidden, take down the forerunners, make sure they have no backup coming. I'll handle the group to the right. Uchiha, left."

Tenten would've expected Sasuke to object to taking directions from Neji, but a raised eyebrow is all the protest he gives before he slips away, slithery and sinuous as a snake, without even a nod.

She shudders at the sight; there's something wrong with a pregnant girl moving that way.

Concealed as per Neji's instructions (because as usual she is given the soft job, by him and by lee and by gai-sensei, and she is starting to realize her childish ambition of becoming a great kunoichi like tsunade-sama is not going to be granted this side of rebirth) she keeps one eye out for potential enemies, the other shifting between her teammates.

She has always loved watching Neji move with the perfect unstoppable grace of a typhoon, until he becomes a brilliant blur and pride and envy ache in her, choke her. She doubts he has ever experienced a stumble, a limb refusing the command to move gracefully.

Today, however, she is rather more concerned with the temporary addition to their team. A year older and fancying herself mature or not, she was a girl in the Academy when he attended it: it's a given she knew of Uchiha Sasuke, a given she crushed on him.

She thinks, sheepish, that she even confessed to him once or twice.

"I don't have time for this," he said.

It was no more than a variation of what he replied to every brave soul.

But there has been a lot of water under the bridge since then, and a traitor female Sasuke losing his looks and what little good humor he possessed to apparent sleeplessness and underfeeding in addition to approaching motherhood is a far cry from her idea of Prince Charming.

It's silly and shallow, so she wouldn't notice if it wasn't severe: he's shockingly unattractive. There are a handful needle-thin wrinkles around his eyes, his face is washed-out and his neck a patch-work of scars, and he is altogether too bony around the bump on the stomach.

How Naruto manages to be attracted to _that_ she probably doesn't want to know, and then she's not even touching on the freaky golden eyes.

Good night-vision, she remembers that snake eyes have. And no ability to cry.

Regardless, she has to freely admit that he makes for a magnificent ninja. Smirking meanly he stands a good distance away from evidently bewildered enemies, forming lightning-quick seals.

Genjutsu overlapping genjutsu, she realizes, so that if they manage to break out of one they wake up straight into another.

By the look of things he's playing with them; none of them are a threat, dazed with confused horror, clawing at their eyes.

Do snakes play with their kills the way cats do?

All of a sudden I am cold.

She turns minutely as Neji comes up beside her, glancing once at his impassive face as he too stands watching Sasuke – who startles her by finishing the job quite suddenly, arrogance melting into stark paleness as he makes a fast, slashing motion with one hand, pressing the other protectively to his stomach, cradling his abdomen with white fingers.

His lips move around what looks like a curse; and about half of the ninja trapped in his genjutsu abruptly commit suicide. Those who did not still seem dazed, but their eyes are going clearer, motions steadier – she realizes Sasuke is no longer affecting them, but not why.

By the time she is at his side, reluctant but curious, Neji has stepped in and is dealing swift elegant death to the remaining, still befuddled enemies. Having ascertained with a glance that her Hyuuga teammate does not need any aid she jumps down beside Sasuke, instinctively reaching out to wipe perspiration off his ashen brow but stopping herself in time.

"What's wrong?"

He does not acknowledge her presence, just breathes deeply and curls inward around his abdomen. It's panic, it comes to her, that subtle alteration of his expression. A scared, pained kind of frustration. He isn't even humiliated, not yet.

His face is smooth, with a very tight sort of expressionlessness, hinting at emotions that frighten her even as she can't help but feel a bit of sympathy, a touch of smugness.

His knees buckle; one of his hands locks a grip around the trunk of a tree. A minute ago it would have splintered the wood, but without chakra behind it it's just a normal hand, not inhumanly strong and rather dirty, white fingers digging into the bark.

Turning from his fallen foes, Neji takes in the situation with neutrality so absolute it can only mean his feelings are canceling each other out.

It's the first time he's ever seen the Uchiha avenger who sleeps in Naruto's bed truly pathetic.

(i won't be)

(if nothing else, i'll be better than you)

"Can you get up?" he asks evenly, won't stoop to gloating.

"Soon," Sasuke says, panting shallowly through his teeth.

_The baby moved_.

It moved and it hurt like hell, and he is fighting down hyperventilation, the world a dark red turmoil.

Not from pain, those pants, Neji knows. From the panic that might come with it, when it's bad and at the absolutely wrong time and place.

And he knows how kindness, how decency, can defeat the unjust.

(_i'll change hyuuga for you!_)

"You won't lose – it," he says, looking Byakugan at Uchiha, going beyond hatred for the brief instant he can manage. "Using this much chakra should have damaged it, but I can't see it has. We had better bring you to medical attention, all the same. Can you manage?" Haughty distaste teases warm through him at the thought he must perhaps make a clone and have it carry Uchiha back.

"I'll manage," Uchiha says shortly. His posture is more relaxed, if no less convulsive, though Neji is hard pressed to think Uchiha entirely believes his reassurances. Slowly, careful like with an explosive or something infinitely precious and equally fragile, Uchiha inches upright until he's properly standing, still holding onto the tree, ash-gray in the face. He gets no further, fingers tightening visibly around his stomach.

"We'll leave in half an hour," Neji announces after some brief deliberation and after discovering that his You Are Brining Us All Down Look doesn't have any noticeable effect on Uchiha. "I'll keep watch. Tenten, give him one of your scrolls. He can at least throw things."

xxxxx

"I'll be fine from here," Sasuke says once they are inside the village walls. Then, because hell will freeze over before he lets Hyuuga Neji hold a dept of gratitude over his head, he bows stiffly, formally. "Thank you very much for your help."

Neji nods crassly, presumably familiar with hating the humiliating constriction of owing; Tenten flutters hesitantly but leaves without protest when Neji gestures for them to be off.

Alone with his scared, sullen hatred, with the convulsions chasing agony out along the stretches of his nerves, Sasuke gives himself a few moments to regain composure. Collected again as best as he's able, having wiped the stench of liquid fear/pain from his brow, he starts towards the hospital. Funny he should frequent the place, considering how he abhors it.

The child has moved. It is _alive._

No one bothers him until the reception desk, against which he must allow himself to collapse, weight sagging onto his elbows.

"Haruno Sakura," he orders.

The receptionist looks at him uncertainly. "Are you…?"

"Uchiha Sasuke." Hell if he'll willingly identify himself as a patient.

"Just a moment. I'll call her immediately."

Sakura jogs into the reception area in a matter of moments: he can practically feel her evaluating his vital stats from half a room away.

Apparently reasonably satisfied with what she finds, she smoothes her skirt, walks the last meters briskly though composedly.

"Sasuke?"

She briefly hates herself as she hurries to him – _I'd made up my mind not to get into these situations!_ Told herself again and again and finally told him as well that she couldn't handle it, wouldn't advertise for heartbreak. Sasuke and Naruto are pathologically unable to let go, she recognizes that, understands it. But she does not share their background of abandonment, she wants something normal, something that doesn't have to be 'till death us do part.

Overloaded with work and seeing Ino when she's off duty, she's been able not to think. To simply face grim death, and be happy she can do something to help, and smile and sigh in Ino's arms.

Then someone tells her Uchiha Sasuke is here to see her, come quick, and her heart is in her throat and beating triple time, won't let her breathe.

I love you, she wants to tell him, but I don't want to anymore. Don't break me.

She says his name, looking into reptilian eyes and reminding herself that this is not the boy she knew, this is not the boy she fell in love with or grew to love.

It doesn't help much.

"This way," she says, and leads him to where they can talk in private. "What's the matter?"

After a short explanation overlaying muted, angry bewilderment she nods, explains in her doctor voice that I'm going to check now (so don't hurt me) but if Neji said it's alright it probably is.

"A pair of Byakugan would be really useful," she adds with tense levity, stroking prodding chakra over Sasuke's child.

"But I wasn't doing anything," Sasuke says, voice short and displeased as it gets when he understands he's done wrong but not why.

"You were employing large amounts of chakra," Sakura contradicts. "By the fifth month the baby's chakra system starts seriously developing, which makes it dangerous for the mother to use too much." She looks up from her occupation with his abdomen. "I'm sorry. I honestly thought you were aware of this."

Sasuke's mouth is thin and sullen. "How much is 'too much'?"

She debates it briefly, offers him a thoughtful expression. "I'll give you two Chidori a week, with several days in between them. Five shadow clones a day, if you maintain each of them for half an hour and do nothing else."

"I'm – crippled."

"You're in for a stint as an average person," she says dryly (i'm not a cripple! am i?). "Count your blessings, Sasuke-kun: Tsunade-sama is forcing everyone who can heal at all to work in the hospital, but you wouldn't be much use like this."

"What makes you think I'm any kind of healer?"

"The fact you spent three years around Kabuto, observing one of the best medical ninja in modern time with the Sharingan, might have clued me in. Anyway," and she takes her touch from him, "the child's healthy."

"Thank you." He's expressionless, painfully neutral. It registers on her that while he has never much talked to her, the silence has grown different – it used to be that he had nothing to say to her, now it seems more a case of him not knowing how to say it.

Again she wants to say, I love you. I wish that mattered more.

"Sasuke," she says, slow with dread, but the words are coming, an inevitable rush gaining momentum as they tumble over her lips. "About the baby. Are you – sure? Should you really…? I mean, I mean it's risky, and how would you raise a child anyway, and about whose it is, and are you ever going to tell Naruto, and forget what I'm saying."

"What is it that you think I should tell him?" Sasuke hisses icily, hopelessly. "That I sent my brother straight from the little death into the grander?"

"No," she says, weak voice, weak knees. "I did not want you to tell me that either."

Sasuke stares at her, sees Itachi superimposed over her features. He says, because it is the closest he can get to a question, "I will never mean to hurt you."

"I know that," she says, and she might even be telling the truth. "But could you – could you love Itachi's child?"

"Hardly," says Sasuke. "It's not required to be loved."

"You can't do that!" she protests, even though she knows he can. "Children who aren't loved turn out – in ways they shouldn't."

"So long as it grows strong and breeds heirs, I really could not care less."

He doubts he will be able to stand looking at it, a child begotten by a brother he refuses to remember, for hatred and childhood vows. The child belongs to the past, to all the dead ones, will lift their claim from him, will be payment for his depts.

Or that is what he makes himself believe.

(_you can't let go of him, even now_)

Sakura thinks about calm, reasonably satisfying days. Of a work well done but not spectacular, of maybe inventing improved versions of some jutsu and helping people get along with their lives. Of a nice, sunny apartment with a large kitchen, of smiling at Ino in the morning and going to sleep beside her at night, after the sex has stopped being awkward. Of meaningless arguments and familiar smiles, little touches and small concerns.

She'd have liked that, she decides. Her parents were right, she isn't ninja material: they enrolled her in kunoichi kindergarten so she'd learn to defend herself, and then there were Ino and Sasuke and _my life_, and once you're in, how can you get out? How can you even try to?

She's learned some certain things, and reaches a decision.

"Can I have it, then?"

"What?" he snaps in that cold, sullen tone she recognizes so well.

"Your child. You don't want it for yourself. May I have it instead? I'll raise it and take care of it and love it, if I'm able, and you can arrange for whomever you see fit to train it."

"Why?"

"Because everyone deserves better than what you got. I believe I can give it that. Think about it."

_You and Naruto couldn't raise a child if you tried, and neither of you even wants to_, he fills in.

He says, "…I will."

She smiles briskly. "Great. Say hi to Naruto for me, okay? It was forever since I saw him."

Actually she's hardly seen him once since the miserable spectacle when the village attacked him and his heritage was declared. Since one edge of his smile became mask and his vitality so interwoven with brutality that she understands for the first time why people might fear him.

She would never, but then she knows better than to trust Sasuke, as well.

"I will," Sasuke says again, and she nods and leaves, and so does he.

He hates being around her because he can't let go and he can't grab hold.

Hell.

_You're essentially helpless until your child is born – when it is I can take it from you._

Bloody hell.

He'll be stuck on D-ranks for months (missions for the children, the helpless, the crippled, the innocent).

"Sasuke." Slowing his gait minutely so the faster stride can catch up, he allows Kakashi's hand to close lightly over his shoulder, turning his head sideways to look up into his former teacher's face. "You look like shit."

He snorts impatiently.

"I was going for lunch, in the hope of stopping people nagging me about being anorectic," Kakashi adds. "You up for tagging along?"

"Might as well."

He is so damn sick of forcing himself to eat and eat and only getting thinner, but considering he's in one of the periods when he's dominated by general hatred for the world at large, this can hardly be worse than anything else

xxxxx

Having parted with Uchiha, Neji rids himself of Tenten by means of a distant expression and a few quick strides. She knows when not to bother him, which Lee refuses to learn.

He walks quickly and quietly through the village, thinking about thinking about difficult issues rather than actually thinking about them. He has been taught to avoid what pain he can, but perhaps it is better to clean the wounds out, cut off the festering.

Unfortunately he has never been healer material, at all.

Distracted, unwilling and with nervousness dewing his palms, he walks into Naruto.

As always the Kyuubi host strikes Neji almost blind with color: vivid orange, intense blue, sharp hues of pain and laughter, his very movement like the bold brush of a child's brush.

"Neji," he says, and sounds surprised and something that could be – could be anything, really. Pleasure or displeasure or just polite greeting. They haven't talked since the wedding. Definitely haven't touched.

Of course, the only time Naruto has willingly touched him has been in violence or brief, passing gestures of camaraderie (your kiss wasn't for me).

Neji politely does not study him with the Byakugan, refuses to analyze the amounts of red and blue chakra struggling for dominance, the sundering main seal that must be all but glowing on Naruto's stomach for the fine hairs on Neji's neck to rise at this distance from the sheer conflicted power. There's wildness to the blue eyes, and weariness painted as shadows below them. We've all been worked stupid lately.

"Naruto."

The name raps from his throat, gruff. It's just a dumb fucking name. Why did he expect it'd mean something to say it out loud, in daylight?

He does not let himself shake his head, pushes self-consciousness away and reminds himself that he is going to be the better man, better than you, Uchiha.

"I sincerely apologize," he says, and bows the deep, elegant bow of old nobility, so humble it oozes arrogant power. Looks at the ground, at Naruto's blue sandals and his own brown hair falling around his face. "For before. I was out of line."

"'S cool," Naruto says, and there's the sound of someone stretching to scratch awkwardly at the back of their head. "Just, you know, don't do it again."

Neji nods stiffly, standing straight again and fixing his gaze on Naruto's chin (don't look at the whisker scars you traced once with your tongue and which are growing deeper and broader). He would never assault anyone who could not defend themselves, and he cannot defend himself from Naruto. In any way that matters.

_I'm going to be the better man_, and maybe he has grown used enough to pain to find some obscure comfort in its embrace.

"Perhaps you are looking for Sasuke?" He almost stumbles over the name, but only almost. "He went to the hospital; there was some minor trouble with the pregnancy."

Naruto's face is so open it becomes closed: expresses so many emotions so clearly that they all blur. Neji thinks he sees love and regret, fear and craving, but can't be certain.

Doesn't activate the Byakugan until Naruto has left, when he reminds himself again, _I'm going to be the better man_, and turns towards home.

Hinata-san looks up from the main garden to greet him, and he makes (forces? lets?) himself smile as he pauses briefly. They talk softly, the required inquiries regarding his mission and their unborn child, and he makes his voice soft too, mild around the blunted words that strive instinctively towards sharpness.

It's not her fault. It's not his fault.

People are who they are, and he thought she was cute and he beat her almost to death and he parted her thighs and left a child.

Her hand flutters, pressing briefly against her stomach, her chest, her cheek, brushes quickly against his hair.

"I finished the mission with Uchiha," he says. "I saw Naruto. I'll try."

She nods, flabbergasted. Composes herself to say, not sweetly: "I'll do the best I'm able."

"I'm not – asking you for anything."

"Nor I you. There is a difference between taking and receiving."

"Perhaps."

(_i'll change hyuuga!_) Maybe they will.

Later, hours and hours later, Neji-san looks at her with weirdness. Hinata cannot describe the expression with any other adjective, and perhaps he could not either.

The stare becomes strange because due to circumstances it strives for nearness, but Byakugan eyes are not meant to communicate anything but distance. Her brother's (for she thinks of him as a brother still, a times like this, like she did all those years when he was her cousin) nature is indicative of cold, and Hyuuga has never been a clan to foster warmth.

Which leaves them both at loss now in front the hearth in the bedroom, Hinata's growing stomach bridging the gap between them.

xxxxx

"Right," Naruto mutters, turning once to glance quickly over his shoulder at Neji, minimal now in the distance (it hardly matters anymore).

He enters the hospital quickly, and for a wonder no one moves to stop him. Either they consider it sacrilege to lay hand upon the beloved Fourth's bastard love child, or they're calling for backup. Wisely, Naruto decides to assume the latter and hurries to ask for Sakura-chan.

"You too?" she mutters affectionately when she comes to fetch him, then grows somber, the edges of her face harder, when she sees the hungry, animal tint that seems always to linger on his features these days. The red chakra hangs in heavy dominance around him. "Don't tell me you managed to get hurt?"

"Nah," he says (thinking: sasuke hasn't had opportunity to do anything, has he? 'course i'm not hurt). "Heard Sasuke managed to fuck himself up, though. He still here?"

"No," she says with a little smile that's so much anxiety it's almost agony.

"Sakura-chan." The childish nakedness of emotion in his voice, the instinct to grab and hold. His hand on her shoulder, his gaze on her face.

"It's alright." She swallows. "Or, he's alright, at least, and so's the child. He used a bit too much chakra, is all. Disturbed the baby's developing chakra system. They'll both be fine if he cuts down on it." She pushes hair out of her face (brushes tears from her eyes?), sobers. "This means he's vulnerable, Naruto. Do not forget this, do not do anything stupid."

"I know. I won't. I promise."

(_it's the promise of a life time!_)

He's failed her enough. He's failed himself enough.

On the way home he catches sight of that distinctive black head in a café, recognizes the gesture of an arm like a frost-covered twig pushing food around on a plate.

Sasuke's decidedly averse to food, these days. Naruto has at long length realized why, and how bad it is: that it's no kind of eating disorder, not even exactly lack of appetite, it's just that Sasuke doesn't like eating substantial and balanced meals for someone else's sake (the baby would die before i did if i stopped, so eating is to help it, and i hate it).

_If you don't want it there are easier and safer ways to get rid of it_, Sakura-chan said.

But it's never that simple, with Sasuke, in reality. He wants the child desperately. He detests it with the same dull fervor.

Just like he felt for Itachi.

Naruto would really feel a lot better if he knew who the other parent was.

Then, on the other side of the little table, half opposite and half beside Sasuke, he sees another fall of hair, equally rare and unmistakable.

_Last I saw Kakashi he was chatting up Anko._

Except the only one Kakashi is currently chatting with is clearly Sasuke himself.

I'm not sleeping with him anymore, Sasuke said, or as good as. And Sasuke has never been a liar, not at all, but Orochimaru always was, and things change.

Naruto has changed: hates himself that he can think of Sasuke like this, disbelieve him and doubt everything all the time.

(i'll just see for myself, then)

He pushes the door open at the same time Sasuke rises, bending forward to do something (say something private? touch?) before moving towards the far exit, apparently without noticing Naruto, leaving a mostly empty plate and a bundle of cash on the small table.

(_you know where the money's kept_

naruto wonders if he meant that implication, meant it the way it sounded)

But it seems Sasuke wasn't being entirely dishonest before, for who is that but Anko? Like a rude child Naruto remains standing just inside the door, watches the Jounin kunoichi drop a hand on Kakashi's shoulder, watches her searching look and Kakashi's dull expression.

Anko's face is as calm as he has ever seen it, a little naked without the accustomed shook of hair crowning it; a lot of it got lost in the raid that left her so badly injured. She says, "Why are you so obsessed with him? Why is he so precious to you?"

It's been a long time since Kakashi last looked so decidedly too young for his white hair. "Right back at you."

She flinches, the barest, most graceful of movements, and Naruto knows they are talking about the same person yet they aren't.

And for the first time there is sympathy, true sympathy, for the both of them and for Kakashi: he imagines having Sasuke's laugh, the short-sharp bark and the sultry scornful hiss of it, having Sasuke's hands, the strength and the softness, having Sasuke forever on the far side of the looking glass. His pain and need and touch and words and intensity for you conditionally, in maybes, never in certainties.

Naruto'd force Sasuke to love him, if it were him.

xxxxxxxxxx


	31. Looking Weak

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 31:**

"**Looking Weak"**

"I'm not sure this is a good idea."

"No shit," Tsunade snaps. It's ten o'clock in the morning and she already feels a little drunk. Thirty hours without sleep and a glass or two of sake will do that to you. "But with Uchiha on some fucking maternity leave, who else should I send? Hanabi? Iruka? Against the one Akatsuki we've confirmed the location of! The two of you are the only ones we have, and you're going. Now."

"I need to get my stuff," Naruto objects, every muscle straining in anticipation of finally getting to duke it out with the Mystery Organization of Fruitcake-y Evil.

"Obviously," Tsunade agrees with a sneer that would make Sasuke proud. "You also need to ask your _sweetheart_ for more details – maybe his memory will improve now you're the one needing the info."

"I'm hearing that too," Kakashi decides, and Naruto reluctantly nods. He's hard pressed to do anything else, is ashamed he wants to scream denial. In awkward silence they leave the Hokage office together, walking fast over the dusty streets; even the cleaners are working low-rank missions in order to let the qualified ninja take on the more difficult assignments.

They find Sasuke leaning against a tree in an attitude of smug suffering. Of course, Naruto has heard Tsunade managed to convince Sasuke, through rather underhanded means that included both some pointed hints about who's in charge of the medical competence a birth requires and an appeal to Orochimaru's twisted sense of humor, but it was impossible for him to imagine Sasuke teaching anyone anything.

"Leader!" Konohamaru announces in the exhausted, glorying tones of someone who has walked through the circles of hell and found at last his savior.

Today has, mildly put, done little to make it to the list of Best Days in the Life of Konohamaru.

Ebisu-sensei assembled them all yesterday and told them he was gravely opposed to the idea, but Tsunade-sama had decided to ignore his advice on the matter because he was needed for A-ranks, and Uchiha Sasuke would be supervising them in his place for the foreseeable future.

"Don't ever trust him," he said, and Konohamaru nodded through the strange wooden feeling of being alone in the world with Uchiha in the Forest of Death, frozen through and through, pissing himself in frank fear, crying through it. "He can't use much chakra, and you can't count on him to look out for you, and for the love of all that is holy, don't provoke him. Be careful. Make me proud. I believe in you all."

So this morning when he arrived at the meeting spot he didn't find Ebisu-sensei's familiar figure. Actually there was just him at first, then the rest of his team. Uchiha turned up at the correct time with frightening punctuality, looking quite a bit like Moegi's older sister did during her pregnancy, when the expansion of her womb crushed her bladder and forced her up to pee a billion times a night, gloomy and mean.

What the hell were they supposed to call him, now? Sasuke-sensei? Uchiha-sama?

He didn't let Moegi take his hand because he didn't want to appear weak.

Uchiha looked them over gruffly with shadowed golden eyes, raised a disgusted brow.

Looked a right horror, just shy of eight months pregnant (konohamaru can't quite decide whether the swell of the stomach makes him seem more or less monstrous), and summoned a shadow clone which he then transformed into a frightful half-naked warrior with a bandage around the lower half of its face and a great big sword, and ordered them to fight it to give him a rough idea of what little they can do.

They've been at it now for a couple hours, and Konohamaru can feel sweat and blood trickle down his back and forehead. They are not getting anywhere.

Now here is Naruto, and Konohamaru is abruptly reminded of walking in on him and Uchiha in the bedroom, stares hard and blushes.

"Konohamaru," Naruto smiles, with a wave for all of them, eyes on Uchiha only.

And for the first time Konohamaru's afraid of Naruto, like he wasn't even when the blond snapped outside the Compound that time, for the simple devastating reason that Naruto can walk up to Uchiha, and touch and tease him like it's nothing (like it's everything), can grin at Uchiha's murderous face, and lock fingers in his hair and move his face, make him do what goes for smile, on him.

Thus distracted, Konohamaru is too slow to notice the transformed clone sneaking up behind him, and has to roll desperately to avoid decapitation, feeling skin tear off his left shoulder. Neither Uchiha nor Kakashi-sensei pays him any mind at all; Naruto hears the scuffle and throws a glance his way, sounds a little puzzled but like he's focusing on graver matters as he says, "Zabuza?"

Uchiha shrugs, still with Naruto's hand on his arm, and Kakashi-sensei steps up close to them. Fully occupied avoiding messy death, Konohamaru has no attention to spare trying to eavesdrop on the quiet, serious conversation that ensues.

"Alright," Naruto says at last, and thinks about kissing Sasuke, wants to kiss Sasuke, but he's going to be better than that, better than acting childish and selfish in front of Kakashi.

"Do you have chakra to spare?" Kakashi asks Sasuke. "I didn't have time to bother with the hospital medics."

"I do," Sasuke says, and Kakashi nods and pulls up his shirt, revealing a handful long nasty gashes winding up his side, licking his ribs. "Let go, Naruto. Are they clean?"

"As far as I can tell," Kakashi says, and Naruto makes himself step back a little, staring with intent helplessness as concentration wipes Sasuke's face clean of emotion, strips all traces of Orochimaru from the familiar features that might never have been touched by the Sannin (it's the same reason i love watching sasuke sleep). His hands are small and rough on Kakashi's torn skin.

"Alright," Kakashi repeats when he's finished. "Let's go."

"Yeah," Naruto says. "Yeah, let's."

At this point Konohamaru has to duck and roll again in desperation; when he chances a new glance of reproach at his So-Called Teacher But Actually Would-Be Murderer, Naruto and Kakashi-sensei are gone and Uchiha is looking frankly dangerously pissed off. Konohamaru sort of hopes he'll give birth soon, so they can be rid of each other and so the pregnancy can stop souring Uchiha's already non-peachy mood.

Oh shit, here comes the clone again.

Oh _shit_!

xxxxx

"So," Naruto says. "Um."

Kakashi turns his face minutely sideways to toss him a glance, not stopping, and Naruto looks forward again.

What do I have to say?

As little as Kakashi, it seems.

By nightfall, when they stop around a small fire and roast a hare, the elder man pauses between two mouthfuls, asks, "How are you, now? How much chakra can you use before it becomes dangerous?"

"A lot," Naruto says around a swallow of slightly burnt meat. Tries to think of something to use as an example, some kind of measure. "I can have the clones making their own Rasengan. A few of them, at least. Injuries heal while they're being made."

"Ah," Kakashi says. "And how coherent are you at this point?"

Naruto shrugs, feeling insulted and uncomfortable. "Sasuke's never used a Tsukiyomi yet. Just, you know, a punch or two."

And maybe, like, a handful Chidori, and that coward sound jutsu that made Naruto bleed profusely from his ears, and quite a few fire techniques…

"Ah," Kakashi says again. "But I don't have the Mangekyou as a last resort, and I'd think you stop for Sasuke in a way you wouldn't for me. I'm not very good at healing myself, and I know for a fact you couldn't do it for me."

"So, how much can _you_ do? Before you strain your Sharingan and collapse?"

"I'm sure you remember the fight with Zabuza and Haku," Kakashi replies (yeah, the first time i saw you kill). "There's nothing to hold me back this time, but the limit is still there, and absolute."

"Alright."

They cannot speak of anything but mission details; everything else is Sasuke, and betrayal and jealousy and suspicion, old trust and new boundaries and so inflamed. Unsafe, in circumstances where we have to depend on each other.

Naruto might not trust Kakashi alone with Sasuke, but he does trust the man at his back with enemies around. Seems Kakashi has grown to depend on him, as well, and really, that shouldn't be as flattering or reassuring as it is.

He supposes in a way Kakashi is still the only father he has ever had (like iruka's my mother).

Then they are there, the fight's here, and the Akatsuki is.

Naruto has only ever seen Uchiha Itachi and Hoshigake Kisame in the distinctive black-and-red robes, but there is no doubt left by the sickly, immense chakra that's too much like Sasuke's for comfort, but don't linger on that now.

The battle is brutal and long and ugly. Don't release too much of Kyuubi, Kakashi warned him, but Naruto is not keen on dying, and the world is red instinct, and he can feel the spiral twist undone on his stomach.

And if there had only been one Akatsuki, they might have been quite alright: Naruto red-eyed but recoverably sane, Kakashi with some reserves left.

However, it turns out the Akatsuki man has a comrade.

This leaves a bit of a mess, mildly put. Hours after Naruto stumbled over their goal, fox instinct and sloppy footing combining inadvertently but in retrospect quite elegantly, it is finally over.

Of the two Akatsuki there are only scattered remnants, a torso here, a leg there. Naruto is kneeling ferally over an upper body, ripping stripes of flesh with his bare hands – hands which are larger than they should be, clawed, strong enough to tear bone.

Meters and chakra levels away Kakashi forces himself up on one elbow, uses his other hand to drag his knee forward until he can support himself on it. Agonizingly slowly he struggles upward, keeping his eyes closed against the dizzying red swirl that has taken over his vision, clinging desperately to the one tree he can reach, calculations spinning through his head without making sense, conclusions playing hide and seek with damage assessments.

The long and the short of it is that he is probably going to die.

Naruto is off the deep end, dropping the mangled torso with a muted thud, and Kakashi – well. Kakashi might have escaped, for a while, could have survived gravely maimed but still breathing, had he been in top shape.

Obito's Sharingan is over-strained into blindness, a red-black pulse throbbing through his head and robbing his other eye too of most of its vision, leaving him with barely the adrenaline to keep his body moving. His left side is broken from cheek to ankle, a stepladder of sundered bone – he traces the inside of his mouth with his tongue, feels the lumps of flesh bitten from his cheek, the holes where some of his teeth have been hit clear out of his mouth, the sharp angle where his jaw broke against the rock.

He feels it is probably his clothes alone that keep his arm and side attached – skeleton scratches through skin, brushing the fabric.

When he was a kid he always kept a cool phrase in mind, so he'd have an unforgettable line to deliver as his last words.

But the kind of pain that kills you, he has since had the misfortune to learn, tends also to rob you of the coherence needed for speech. Shock isolates him from some of it, and it's still bad enough death doesn't seem like the worst thing that could happen.

(he's been living on time borrowed from obito for longer than is fair already)

It's a bloody miracle he managed to fall correctly enough the pipes haven't punctured anything lethal yet.

"Kakashi-sensei!"

Only through the torment of supporting hands pressing agony into his body does he realize he was toppling forward, that Naruto is apparently not going to kill him after all.

"Ah," he mumbles, gushing blood and something thicker.

Naruto stares into nothing with slow, astonished horror, feeling the stupidest little boy in the village again, refusing to understand what's happening as Kakashi slumps limply into his arms.

("i'm not going to let anyone on my team die")

("there are people in this world younger than you and stronger than me")

("look for the thing with white feathers")

("no," naruto says, dumbly and impotently. and furiously)

He eases Kakashi down as gently as he's able, pawning incompetently with fear at his body to get an overview of the damage, which looks considerable, too much, too bad, no. The thin scarred face is beaten out of all proportion, and what Naruto can glean of the rest of his teacher suggests he shouldn't try his luck removing any clothes – bleeding doesn't seem to be the main problem, so not riskining movement or the jarring it could bring has to be his top priority.

Unfortunately this means he can't bring Kakashi to safety or medical aid, and Naruto doesn't know jack shit about healing.

He makes a shadow replication and sends it running madly for help, but they are days from the village and he knows the clones tend to get lost, forget their purpose, if he leaves them to their own devices for too long.

(sakura-chan please help me)

(sasuke forgive me)

What he can do is pump chakra into Kakashi, keep his energy at acceptable levels, make sure he's warm. Drip water into his mouth every now and then, start a fire when the shadows begin to lengthen. Be careful not to look at the scattered evidence of what he's done, because if he panics now Kakashi will have no one save the Grim Reaper to look after him.

"I'd like to go home," is what Kakashi wakes him up by saying the next morning.

Naruto swallows at the sight that greets him when he shakes the cat-nap from his mind and looks down into Kakashi's face.

Makes himself not cry as he asks, in hysterical relief at what the utterance has to imply, "You're not going to die?"

"I'll go home," Kakashi repeats, which isn't exactly the same thing but good enough, has to be good enough.

"How do we do that?" Naruto asks. "How can I help?"

"I need some healing," Kakashi says, words muddled but understandable. "I've got the techniques for that, you have the chakra. I have the inkling you've already been pumping me full of it."

"Y-yeah."

Kakashi nods, a fractional movement he immediately and visibly regrets. "Then give me some more, and I'll take care of the worst."

Naruto's chakra is rough and red even shrouded in smooth layers of milder blueness: Kakashi grabs it with mental fingers, threads it into his own power until he can shape it, force it under his will, however clumsily. Forming the necessary seals hurts more than anything has, physically, since he lost his eye; bones shattered through most of his hand so that he must animate it with chakra, force the muscles to move despite the shards of skeleton obstructing them.

Finally he has it, and presses the first healing jutsu to his face – needs the broken bones there mended enough that they don't start getting friendly with his brain.

Next stop is his ribs, to avoid injury on lungs and heart. The rest will simply have to wait until Tsunade can see to him.

"Alright," he says at last, and his mouth works almost properly now but he's so far gone into pain he's all but forgotten how to form words. "I'm afraid I can't walk by myself."

Naruto gives him a shaky, teary grin and lifts him as carefully as he has ever touched anything. Thankfully Kakashi passes out the moment Naruto hefts him; he adjusts his grip, resting the limp head against his shoulder, and runs like hell, which is difficult both because his heart's trying to beat its panicked way out of his chest and because Kakashi is so tall he makes for a very unwieldy burden.

Through sheer stupid luck he manages to take a wrong turn and stumbles into a small village, is directed to a hospital. Any doctor has to be better than no doctor, right?

Four days later Kakashi is up and about, heavily bandaged and sedated, to the screeched bewildered horror of the entire medical staff. Naruto thinks he has never been so glad to see Kakashi as he is when he watches the man shuffle slowly out the hospital doors, waving polite dismissal at the employees.

"Let's go home."

And they do. Neither has traveled this slowly since pre-Genin days, but they are each on their own two feet.

Even now, he cannot speak: gladness, relief, be melodramatic and call it _love_ – these tangled emotions tie knots as efficiently as ever the previous ones on his tongue, and in no way eradicates the earlier feelings of disgust, resentment and broken, envious trust.

xxxxx

"Ino," Sakura mutters, pushing playfully at blond hair. "Let me up. I really need to be going. No, seriously…"

Ino grumbles in protest, tightening her grip around Sakura's torso, poking a chilly nose against the back of Sakura's shoulder-blade. "Where are you going anyway?" she mumbles into Sakura's skin. "I thought this was your day off."

"If it weren't," Sakura replies dryly, "I might as well not go at all, because Tsunade-sama would have had my head for being this late."

"So," Ino repeats, opening and closing her lips in what might be a yawn or a kiss, "where are you off to?"

"Sasuke," she says, after some consideration, and Ino's hand stills on her neck, fingers tightening around fly-way strands of pink hair. She sighs, goes on to elaborate, "He's going on eight months pregnant now and he's not in the best of shapes. Someone needs to look after him. Besides," and she shifts further into Ino's embrace, relaxed again, "Naruto's been away awfully long on that mission, and I'm getting worried. I already was, actually, and I want to hear more about the new Kyuubi situation."

"I don't really like the thought of you seeing him alone. Shikamaru and Temari would come along if I asked, we could all go together."

"Way to get him on the defensive," Sakura says, pushing free gently to sit up. "He'd never hurt me."

"Sakura, he tried to _strangle_ you!"

"He did," she agrees, "when he was out of his mind with trauma and exhaustion and didn't know what he was doing. Besides, Tsunade-sama likes him even less than you, if that's possible, and she evidently feels safe letting him loose on Team Konohamaru."

"I still do harbor the suspicion that's a cunning plan on her part to get rid off the little twits," Ino remarks, but sounds happier, if still faintly pissed.

"Sure," Sakura says indulgently. "I'm sure you're right." A glance over her shoulder reveals that Ino has fallen back with a huff, eyeing her in frustration as she proceeds to get dressed.

In the doorway, presentable or almost, she stops, turns back a little ways. "They're my team," she says. "My family. I love them."

"I know that," Ino says. "That's what's so dangerous about it. Look, Naruto's snapping around the Kyuubi, and Sasuke hasn't been right in the head for years."

"I know," Sakura echoes. "It doesn't change anything."

She leaves Ino in her bedroom, hurrying down the stairs and poking her head into the kitchen to bid Mrs. Yamanaka good morning before stopping to wonder where she might find Sasuke. It's almost midday, which means he should be out somewhere with the kids (is it unkind to snicker at the thought?).

Well. Odds are they're using one of the training sites. She might as well start looking through them.

She's covered three of the spots when she runs into Moegi, a sobbing blur of orange hair and reddened eyes.

"Hey," Sakura calls, catching the child and holding her upright. "What's up?"

"Please!" Moegi cries. "This way, oh please Sakura-san, it's Konohamaru, he…!"

"Coming," Sakura interrupts. "Go ahead, show the way."

Questions can wait until post-event, as usual. Ask what you're healing after you've healed it, as Tsunade-sama keeps saying.

She feels she should be more surprised, more disturbed even, but honestly – Sasuke and Konohamaru? What did anyone expect? Hopefully it isn't so bad.

Bad, yes, but not so bad. Konohamaru is lying curled on his side, Udon standing worriedly over him and Sasuke sneering irritation as he examines the boy.

"Oh lord," Sakura mutters tiredly. "Clear out, let me look at him."

Konohamaru sobs quietly, which means he's at least conscious; she kneels beside him, distantly aware of his teammates standing close by, staring.

"Sasuke," she admonishes, using healing chakra to un-swell the inside of Konohamaru's skull.

"I warned them not to try and get smart with me," Sasuke snaps.

"Jesus," she mutters in disgust, turning to Udon. "What happened?"

He tells her stumblingly, hesitantly, about how Konohamaru went to the lessons and occasional missions day after day paralyzed with fear, wooden and paranoid, until eventually he just could not take it anymore. She thinks of Naruto, charging danger before it can petrify you, of herself, going so far and so long into fear you can barely feel it anymore.

Understands why, faced with some kind of illusion or cloning jutsu, Konohamaru would consider it a viable option to go after the source despite whatever rudely worded warning Sasuke has seen fit to give them.

Konohamaru isn't used to people with killing instincts like Sasuke's, people who always, always strike first, strike hard.

"He'll be fine," she says. "Sasuke, I want to talk to you."

He nods, throws a rather resentful glance at the children. "Dismissed. Take him back to the village, why don't you."

Alone with him at last, Sakura considers her words carefully. Smoothes her skirt and stands up and decides that if she plays this subtly she'll be faced with Orochimaru, which isn't the point.

She says, "Kyuubi."

"Not your concern." He looks mildly displeased: distinctly unhappy.

"I'm not asking for gossip," she protests. "I'm worried, I care. You know Naruto would tell me if he were here."

She is certain that he will refuse, but then he speaks, like the words have been locked inside him too long.

"The original seal is half undone. This much is common knowledge." His words are short, chopped-off. He looks very shifty and very depressed.

"Well," she agrees. "Yes. And I've gathered it gives him all but limitless chakra, and impossible regenerative abilities."

"Quite. Increased speed, senses, everything you'd expect. It's doubtful whether he can age."

She gasps, then immediately feels stupid. Of course Kyuubi won't allow a body it possesses to degenerate, will force new cells interminably.

"Naturally," Sasuke adds, "this means Kyuubi's influence on his mind grows every time the demon chakra is employed, as the entity is released further into Naruto's psyche."

"That's– What are we going to do about that? What can we do?"

About the fact you are living with a person we both love, but who is turning into a monster day by day.

"You're not going to do anything," Sasuke tells her. "Keep your distance. Stay safe."

(from both of you?)

He has only three people in the world, and goddamn it, he is going to end the world before he lets it take another one of them.

"You can't make decisions for me."

He looks rather amused, in a grim, wrinkled way. "You can't stop me."

The next moment, for the first time in living memory, she sees Sasuke terrified, his face relaxing into an ashen sort of laxness. Following his dead, horrified look, her gaze lands on Naruto supporting a weakly stumbling Kakashi. Trained healer's eyes like hers do not need to smell the blood on him, observe all the little catches in his steps, the labored tilt to his breathing; the way his eyes are almost shut and his chakra indistinguishable so close to the blazing tornado of Naruto's.

Sasuke doesn't curse or pray or accuse for the simple reason he cannot speak, does not even notice Naruto save as a mass of chakra that might be dangerous but doesn't matter, hovering like a child over the figure he dares not touch.

His own body has stopped working: he can feel the synapses snapping, the muted, ever slowing beat of his heart, the inhuman weight of his flesh, lost to his will.

The red darkness comes crashing into reality, tearing through it, through me.

"Sasuke," Sakura barks from close by. "Concentrate! Start healing the lighter wounds."

He reacts automatically to the command, pressing seals to the easy parts. Distantly he thinks perhaps someone is holding him upright as he works.

Sakura makes herself not look sideways, focuses only on the work at hand. There is little time to be lost, if Kakashi has walked far enough hurt enough that Naruto is clearly taking most of his weight. Bones are one thing, if healed incorrectly they can always be re-broken and re-done, but organs are trickier, like flesh, with all the veins and nerves entwined in them.

Plainly someone has already taken care of the worst; plainly they have not done it very well.

"Who the hell did this to you?" Sasuke rasps, and she does look at him after all – blind with fury, fingers blurring through seals, seemingly ignorant of Naruto's arm reaching behind Kakashi's back and forward to hold on to Sasuke as well; seemingly supported rather heavily by it, all the same. "I will," and his grip could probably break Kakashi's arm anew if it weren't trembling so badly, "bloody kill them."

"Already taken care of," Naruto says. "Can we move him to the hospital now, Sakura-chan?"

"A moment."

Several minutes later she has finished, as best as she's able, the work on his abdominal organs, and nods clearance.

"Great," Naruto mutters. "Oh, he's in sleepwalker stage again. Sakura-chan, can you take the other side?"

"Oh – of course."

She slips one of Kakashi's arms over her shoulders, locking her free arm around his waist; Naruto continues to support most of his weight, his other hand still grabbing Sasuke, who is unaware enough of this that he definitely needs it.

"I," he says with visible effort and those same scary childish eyes. "Alright. I can–"

"Go warn the hospital," Sakura orders, and he looks torn and spiteful and extremely frightened as he runs.

"I feel kinda bad about suddenly being relieved he's underweight," Naruto says into the stillness, and she laughs and laughs because hell if she's going to cry.

xxxxxxxxxx


	32. Cry of a Thousand Birds

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 32:**

"**Cry of a Thousand Birds"**

"But you handled both of them?" Tsunade demands. "You are absolutely certain they are dead?"

"Yes," says Naruto, feeling chalky, light unto emptiness without Kakashi's weight slung across him. "There was – there's nothing left of them that could possibly be alive."

Kakashi is behind him to the left, on his back in a hospital bed, white skin and white hair against the white bandages and whiter sheets. Sasuke is sitting on the beside, not looking at them, and can't seem to stop touching the unconscious man.

Sasuke tactile? How fucking priceless, in any circumstance but the present ones.

Naruto isn't looking, of course.

"Hmm?" Tsunade says. "Are you quite equally certain you have Kyuubi under control?"

"Can we afford the alternative?" He's done his thinking, and there was never much to consider. This is war, and they need power, and he must do what he must. Simple as falling off a log.

"No," Tsunade agrees. "We cannot. That is precisely why I am asking."

His head is filled with cotton, everything slow and muted over the prolonged grating horror of watching his teacher wasting away in his arms. He stares at her mutely because she's the only thing he can allow himself to focus on.

"Sound is becoming a larger issue than anticipated," she adds. "The survivors have formed several bands, some of which could be led by one or more Akatsuki. On the whole, they are better trained and organized than we originally estimated."

Sasuke (so yeah, apparently he is attuned to their conversation after all) shows the not inconsiderable gall to look a shade I told you so. He says, level and rather grim, "I'll take care of Sound."

"Don't be ridiculous," Tsunade replies briskly, a stern mother with her brat. "You're in no shape to take care of anything. What you will do is provide us with every last shred of information you have so that we may best handle the matter."

"Or," Sasuke says in the silky, slithery tones that aren't his, "you could conserve your resources, wait another month and a half, and I could… persuade them to see things from our perspective."

Orochimaru studies her with a certain amused, curious scorn: a human watching a cornered ant flail in desperation, glorying in the knowledge he can save it or crush it underfoot with the same minimal effort.

With disgust and a thin slice of pity she decides to act her age. "What exactly are you suggesting?"

Naruto shudders, actually shudders in instinctive rejection, as Sasuke focuses on them. Only it isn't really Sasuke at all.

"A greater mind than yours," he says easily, the voice of a sardonic professor, of a teasing classmate, "which is regrettably not hard to come by, would see at once that annihilating formidable foes, which would demand considerable resources and result in the death of many employees, is hardly to be preferred over the alternative of subjugating the aforementioned foes. I'll give them a little show, beat some of them up, and they'll follow me again. I created them."

"You will never be the Hokage of Leaf," Tsunade tells him, in a voice that has gone through sneering and weariness and hated love and out the other side.

Sasuke's face is dark and intense and entirely honest. Hysteria, Naruto thinks, the hormones and the stress and Kakashi hurt and Orochimaru not quite so dominant after all.

"I wouldn't accept the title if I was offered," Sasuke says (doesn't want my dream). "Why the hell would I want it for?"

"I thought perhaps," Tsunade says, and she is a study in vary nastiness, in kind rattling, "your current stint as a mere housewife was beginning to itch."

"Jealous?" maybe-Sasuke sneers. "I recall you never quite got to that part, yourself."

"Stop it," Naruto interrupts. "My god, this is not productive."

Breathing in, breathing out, Tsunade says sharply, "Quite. Fine. I shall consider your proposal." She steps past Naruto, standing at the head-end of the bed and touching a perfunctory fingertip to Kakashi's temple. "He'll recover," she says to Naruto (does not look at their lost one). "I'll need to take another look when he's better, but he'll recover."

"Yeah," Naruto says. "He'd better. Thanks."

With a nod she leaves.

"Are you," Naruto says, stepping up closer to Sasuke. He doesn't know what he's saying anymore, just blindly seeks the warmth.

"I'm staying with him until Anko gets here," Sasuke informs him tonelessly. Not quite Sasuke, not quite not.

A dismissal? Naruto isn't sure, but Sasuke doesn't react to him, is obviously tense and far away. Too much strangeness, with Kakashi hurt and Sasuke oily and Naruto's hands thickly red still from the battle days ago.

"Huh," he says, and leaves too, has to close the door behind him fast.

And abruptly she is there. "_Naruto_."

"Sakura-chan," he replies, or only thinks he replies, into her shoulder, face hidden in the curve of her neck. She does not seem surprised at his grab, stretching to lay slim warm arms around him. Her touch is decisive, so soft it can hardly be felt.

"Hey," she says, and wonders if this is what it's like to try and be a mother. Thinks she should practice, good god no. "Hey, shh, hey, hey, it's okay."

He's trying to say something, choking on it, and there's wetness on her shoulder; whether tears or snot or saliva she doesn't know. Doesn't much want to know.

"It was," he grits out at last, words hard against her pliant flesh. "So bad. I really. And Kakashi-sensei. And I thought he'd die. On me. And what I. With the Akatsuki. And there wasn't even enough left to. I didn't. Where did all the pieces _go_? Weren't enough left to make two bodies. And then. So much blood. Back here, and they're. Unconscious. And not how they should be. He's all. Not him. But cares like he didn't when. About – well."

"I love you," she says. "Sasuke loves you. No matter what. You're you, not Kyuubi. We're going to fix this."

"He doesn't," Naruto protests miserably. "Or, sometimes I'm sure he does. But sometimes I think he's not able." He sniffs audibly, straightens and rubs at his face, forces a grin that's unquenchable after all. "I'm going to make him, though, so that's alright."

"Good. That's – great, Naruto, really, but, um. Maybe you should consider reinforcing the seals until, you know, until the baby's born and they're both out of danger?"

He stiffens only a very little, stands there half-wooden in her arms. "You think I'd hurt him." He doesn't dare make the utterance a question.

"You have before. Look, I don't think _you_ would ever _mean_ to, but you don't always know when to stop, neither of you does, and I am certain Kyuubi does not share your reservations."

His shoulders sag thoughtfully. "Between missions, maybe… What kind of seals were you thinking?"

She makes a helpless gesture, fingers catching in his hair. "I'm no expert in the field. I thought Sasuke…?"

Naruto snort-laughs, helplessly. "No way is he going to admit he needs any such protection, not after Tsunade nailed him with that one about being just a housewife."

Oh lord. The two of them, circling forever, tossing comments in place of fists. The eternal stupid fight they both know they cannot ever win, can never afford to win. Hated circle of mutual need.

Speaking of need…

"Naruto," she says, solemn now looking into those (_painfully_) blue eyes, hoping she does not lie. "He does love you. I told you this before: you never saw him at his worst, his most lost and isolated, when he snapped after your, your stint. You're the one he thought he had to kill in Valley at the End. He _needs_ you. I think he can react now because he knows that what happens to Kakashi won't destroy him, so he'll have to live with it, deal with it. And also, it – really wasn't about him, it was entirely outside of his control. It's a twisted logic, I know, but…"

"But it's Sasuke's logic," Naruto fills in smoothly, more confident than she feels. "He's a twisted person."

"Yes," she agrees, "I'm afraid he is. Hey, come with me home for lunch?"

He nods, and they walk closely in the sunlight. He looks tired in proper lightning, and dirty, blood on his clothes, in his face. She doesn't mention it.

"Just," Naruto says, "if you're doing your mind-reader thing – if Kakashi is his father figure, isn't it _really_ twisted that he, well. That he sleeps with him?"

"I think," she says, slowly, deliberately, taking leftovers from the fridge, "it's one of the very few ways he knows how to be close to people. He… kissed me, once. I'd asked him to – I never thought he'd do it. But he did, and he said some things, and I think, yeah. He has so few people, and has had so very many taken away, that he clings desperately to anyone he has left, any way he can."

(_it's not that i want to sleep with you. it's that i want to make sure i own you, any way i can_)

"I – yeah," Naruto says slowly, then adds sagely, "Sick fuck. Also slut."

xxxxx

"Anko-san," they say when she steps out of the classroom where she's been lecturing prospective Chuunin because she can't work proper missions again until she's entirely managed the new seal situation.

Which means maybe I can't ever again, but don't think about that in front of people.

"Yeah?"

"Hatake Kakashi has been hospitalized. It was thought that you should be informed."

"Really?" Thought by whom? She hasn't even slept with him, just shared a few insults and missions and laughs. There's been the desert sun, and his sealing hands on her neck, and the offered paperback. A chat in a café, a few throw-away remarks, a glance like a touch.

_The idea maybe it isn't too late for everything._

She dismisses the messenger, locks the building, then walks faster – might as well see how he's doing, now they've gone to the trouble of telling her.

She passes through the hospital at speed; doesn't much know her way, but remains reluctant to linger between the asylum-white walls (knows what it's like to have an asylum-white head).

Anko has never been the kind of girl to knock, at least not after – after I reinvented myself, post-Orochimaru.

Other things happen before she opens the door, though.

Things like Kakashi stirring, inching one eyelid partially open to see a blur of black and white. It could be a number of things: the print of a book left open across his face as he fell asleep, dirty snow, stones at night. Uchiha Sasuke.

Yes, given that angry golden glint and the unkind, fuzzy hand twisting at his blanket, it is rather definitely the last option.

"Hey," he croaks, and discovers he can see almost properly with some effort.

Sasuke looks him in the eye, jaw set painfully. He hisses, harshly, feverishly, "You weren't supposed to be such a bloody _incompetent_!"

"Yeah well," Kakashi shoots back with deceptive mildness, head starting to pound, "at least I haven't been carried back into the village twice."

Sasuke's displeased face is horribly childish (the furrowed brows, the pouty mouth) and terribly old (the deepening though needle-thin wrinkles, the sweaty ashen tint to his skin). His hands fist again, abandoning the blanket to twist themselves around Kakashi's shoulders, fingertips digging into his bones. The dark head falls forward, reluctant to look him in the face, closer now.

"Sasuke," he admonishes lightly after some stretch of time. "You're hurting me."

"When do I not?" He looks up with a bitter, old-man kind of half-smile, drops it fast. Continues to touch, though his grip gentles, smoothes the blanket and the skin his nails marked. "Clearly you like it."

"Not when I'm hospitalized, I don't." How bad is it, exactly? Bad enough, evidently, for them to have drugged him enough he can't feel the injured areas. Not bad enough for the painkillers to much impair his thought process, thank fuck.

"No nurse kink?" Sasuke asks with lightness so dry, so dry. "I'm shocked."

He says, not quite as dismissively as he should, "I figure my Sasuke kink gives me enough trouble as it is."

"Ha," Sasuke says, or snorts or laughs, and there's pain on his face and something that might have been care, and his bangs are brushing Kakashi's forehead.

He hovers hesitantly, allows Kakashi's wooden fingers on his face (could not reach to ruffle his hair) but does not reciprocate. Gives, or lets him take, or forces upon him, two slow, deep kisses before he sits up. All about reassurance, feel chaste though they aren't.

"They sent for Anko," he reports.

Kakashi does not reply verbally, lifts an eyebrow marginally, the expression that translates to: _oh?_

Sasuke offers a bit of a mean grin. "It's common knowledge you're getting involved. Guess they thought she was more suited for bedside sweet nothing than I or Gai."

Maitou Gai? The image momentarily blindsides him with terror. Sasuke is just about nasty enough to let the green beast in, too…

Which means Anko opens the door at length to find Kakashi reclining weakly against the pillow, Sasuke slipping off the bed with a brittle expression of smug satisfaction.

She hasn't seen the kid, except that once when he released her seal.

I know why, now.

She doesn't see Sasuke, he's never meant anything to her and he doesn't now. She sees shadows, hears echoes (static in the whiteness inside my head).

"Anko." He nods, clearly noting her reaction and clearly pleased with it.

Fucker. "O-Uchiha."

She takes a large step into the room: face what you must, and anyway then he won't have to walk so close to her when he leaves.

Thankfully the little freak departs all but immediately, not sparing a glance for Kakashi as he does, and she raises an eyebrow and takes his place on the bedside.

"I see you got yourself beat up good this time."

"I'd be worrying about your sight if you didn't." A weak, faked smile. "At least we're two more Akatsuki down."

"Aren't you Mr. Returned Hero?"

"The demises were courtesy of Naruto, I'm afraid. I was concentrating on being the bleeding part of the team."

"I've got some recent experience with that myself."

And it's stupid but it seems they are both smiling, and she can't be sorry she came.

xxxxx

During the night Kakashi sleeps, reluctant but resigned to the necessity, remembrances chasing themselves over his friend's blind red eye.

Remembrance of how, at twelve, Uchiha Sasuke is not a child.

Of how there's pride and resentment over that, in the bruise-black eyes.

Kakashi experienced the same peculiar combination of emotion when he passed the Chuunin Exam at half this sullen brat's age, a little more than twenty years ago, but he has not brought Sasuke here for training that'll win him a title. He has brought him here for training that will save his life and his (considerable and not particularly well-merited) pride from Gaara of the Sand.

It is not a day for memories; he attempts to expel them from his attention, diverts himself with a quote from the latest _Icha Icha Paradise_ movie.

Memory does not allow itself to be deterred; sneers at him in exasperation so keen it's almost tender, rubbing up against him. Closest friend he's ever had, cruelest lover.

He pushes back.

Memory shrugs and envelops him, takes him whether he wills it or not. And suddenly she has a broken twelve-year-old's eyes, the mismatched ugly eyes he can't deny.

…It's happened before.

"Well?" Sasuke demands at last, glaring at Kakashi from below his customary black bangs.

"Now we train," Kakashi says dryly. "Start running."

The glare isn't so much a glare as Sasuke's normal way of looking at people: default mood, not an insult (not that kakashi is particularly concerned with insults). The kid can't be happy the absence of teammates forced him to break the silence they both rather appreciate.

If forcing Naruto to agree to it hadn't been more trouble than it justified, it's doubtful whether Sasuke would have even brought the other of those teammates with him through the previous exam.

He'd kill for her, no doubt, but he doesn't much want her around. Has never seen the point in playing well with others, when there's always someone who drags everyone down, people who let themselves be lost. I don't care. I don't know how to (_don't know how not to, stupid child_).

Kakashi thinks that Sasuke is not quite an asshole yet, but working diligently towards it.

He's almost as stupid as another genius brat was, some fifteen years ago, he too consumed by tragedy and talent, dedicated and driven and fundamentally stunted. The Jounin Exam won't be a problem, nor the probable ANBU one, but things that actually matter will.

Kakashi's rather glad that frankly this is not really his problem, not his business what Uchiha Itachi did a night in early fall four years ago.

"Faster," Kakashi calls distractedly, rescuing a paperback copy of his favorite volume from his back pocket.

Ridiculously, like children are, and Sasuke is a child, still, and not a remarkable one, the Uchiha plainly interprets this as a less than flattering comparison to Rock Lee.

Throws him a hasty, vicious glance, and despite knowing Sasuke's isn't quite foolish enough to waste chakra on needless displays (naruto's not here) Kakashi is convinced for a moment that his student's eyes glare red. It looks like scabs, raw and bloody – like a reminder.

Blood was slick on his face, that day when he was small and looked up upon the dead body that had been his father's. He felt it a long time afterwards, every time he touched his face, before his mother's suicide was etched scarring into his skin.

After Obito's death half the world was left perpetually red.

Lazily, inspired by the Toad Sannin's purple prose, he reflects that Lee runs as though defeating the air through his passage, wins because he beats down his opponent with ruthless strength and hardship. Sasuke, much like the sight that turned Gai green with envy during a Chuunin Exam two decades ago, runs like Itachi, like Neji, like Orochimaru. Like someone who was born to do it, in a world where there is such a thing as talent that can't be overrun by training or ambition.

Huh. No wonder Jiraiya does his best not to think, if the above bears any resemblance to how his thoughts are phrased. Talk about bullshit. Mildly entertaining, though.

"I got us some dinner," Kakashi informs, the evening the second day. "Hungry?"

Of course he is, muttering something Kakashi wisely does not hear (i thought better of your swearing, sasuke) and dropping down to accept the offered food.

Unlike his student Kakashi is discreet about his glancing and, he adds wryly, much less invested in it. It's unlikely the brat notices, but then again Sasuke has surprised him before (never pleasantly).

The new black clothes constitute an aerodynamic improvement, exactly as expected. Less expected, and much less nice, is how they alter Sasuke's appearance from that of a pretty child to that of an attractive youth, clinging to a body that should be gangly and clumsy with puberty but instead gives the impression of lithe, delicate strength. Jesus, Sasuke's going to be a heartbreaker in his time (kakashi worked at it, when he was, quality to sasuke's unwanted quantity). That might turn out to be very funny indeed, so Kakashi isn't certain why he is suddenly less amused.

He sighs, leans back on his elbows. It takes some skill to do that comfortably in this rocky terrain. He's been practicing.

There is no doubt in his mind, as he absently studies the love bite-resembling scar Orochimaru left, that Sasuke is ready to kill.

And that vague, unpleasant contemplation has led him into staring too long; Sasuke is watching him with a pensive expression, one dark brow raised. Done is done, and his student doesn't ask, hence Kakashi merely shrugs and turns the page.

By the fourth night the seal has engraved itself quite clearly upon Obito's eye. He supposes he'd better deal, if he can, get things over with. Sasuke does not speak of it, never has, but Kakashi has long experience in the field of getting around the stingy pride of self-absorbed, not particularly bright brats. Mostly those ways consist of teammates, family members, friends.

With the reservation, in this case, that neither one of them would say Sasuke exactly has friends.

Still, everyone in a team has something, whether he wants it or not.

Sasuke does not like Sakura, in any ordinary meaning of the word. Everyone except Sakura knows he does not like her. In spite of this Kakashi sighs, and does not doubt the accuracy of the witness who told him Sasuke had to be stopped from killing for her. If you aren't wary of the word you might call it love, for him to be protective and territorial of the girl when consumed by Orochimaru's corruption – provided you believe Sasuke capable of love.

Kakashi… doesn't, with some reservations. He recognizes the symptoms, leaves it at that, without comment.

The boy could love the family in his memories, perhaps, that distorted mirror reflection of soiled happiness ridiculously idealized, but a stranger girl of twelve? Hardly.

And yet somehow she matters.

(_protect rin for me, alright? it's the promise of a lifetime)_

Sasuke would kill for her, yes, certainly. Which doesn't necessarily mean much, except it does. In sharp contrast to the rest of his protected generation Sasuke knows death inside and out, might be the only one properly scared of it, of killing and dying both. Has no delusions of grandeur, of death meaning anything but loss (except his brother's, but then itachi has never adhered to the normal standard of anything).

One of the kid's very few insights, and admittedly a useful one.

Kakashi isn't surprised either by this or by Sasuke's readiness to brave the rather healthy fear of killing for Sakura's sake. Kakashi rarely allows himself to be surprised.

He was in Country of the Wave.

It's predictable that Sasuke lives for Itachi, a reasonable conjecture that he'd kill for Sakura. But it changes everything, in its way, that he'd die for Naruto.

You could form hope from that, if you were naïve. But saving Sasuke from himself is no easy task, and Kakashi considers easy to be gravely underrated.

Being something other than avenger – Sasuke tries for it occasionally, dropping hints, clues of other possibilites, but Kakashi knows quite more than he'd like to about certain things being irreplaceable, and Itachi took so much, took Team Seven and the Sasuke who'd have been capable of loving them, took them before Sasuke even had them.

Itachi _meant_ as much as he took. Kakashi heaves a disgusted sigh: knows what it's like to be betrayed by a loved one, in the basest way possible. You don't walk away from that, not by yourself, and there isn't anyone to help Sasuke, like there wasn't anyone to help him. There never is, because those who would are those who turned on you.

He shifts, adjusting his mask, the necessary reminder. It's not his job to save Sasuke, not like this.

He probably couldn't, anyway: could understand, empathize, but he can't reach deep enough, would be left scratching desperately at Sasuke's surface. He's had enough shallow care through his childhood.

Naruto reaches deep enough, but plainly doesn't much know what to do with what he finds there, left raging and starry-eyed around Sasuke's simultaneous exploits into his psyche. Locked in their stupid circle, cut off from the world.

All of which leaves Kakashi with a headache similar to those provoked by Gai's glaring enthusiasm and the knowledge it's at least partially faked, and with Uchiha Itachi still in possession of the upper hand. No surprise: Kakashi would answer to his father, to Obito, in ways he would not to anyone alive. Sasuke too lost everything except the person who took it away; and this is why Sasuke is an avenger and Kakashi is not, though Kakashi is old now, would have been either killed off on his quest or grown a brain before now.

He supposes he doesn't dislike the kid. That perhaps he would step between any of his team and death, if it came to that.

This won't mean he's stupid enough to trust any one of them, Sasuke least of all.

"Kakashi," Sasuke mutters, with that deep displeased voice issuing from his brooding form. It is the evening the seventh day. "This is taking me nowhere."

"Oh?" Kakashi replies, laconic, scathing. "So I just didn't notice that you were already able to beat Rock Lee's taijutsu? Sloppy of me."

Sasuke snorts in reply; a bratty sound typical of spoiled nobility boys, except Sasuke never once voiced it until he no longer had a noble family. Spoiled he probably hasn't been, became remarkable only when the competition died down.

"It's not enough," he insists impatiently. "You know it's not."

Kakashi keeps his face noncommittal, marking his page. "Perhaps not," he concedes evenly, letting his tone grow a smudge more serious, a little of his own darkness bleeding through. This he knows too well. "But power is never for free."

It's rather strange, it strikes him, but he's never actually seen Sasuke smile before. Grins and smirks, every now and then, and sometimes a hint of something else and more, although, come to think of it, he has only ever seen Sasuke offer that to Naruto, for Naruto, and Naruto isn't here. Could he have misread things so gravely?

He supposes this is the rapt, delightful smile Sasuke directed at Itachi, except Kakashi was never interested in observing the Uchiha brothers. The kind of smile Jiraiya has spent so many pages exhausting metaphors to exalt.

"I'm an Uchiha," Sasuke says, with a degrading tone of voice he must have inherited from Itachi and a subtle shift of his expression, turning beautiful. Kakashi has seen better but is still unexpectedly startled, beneath his mask. "I know everything comes with a price."

_Do you, now_, Kakashi thinks. _Of course you do. And you think you've figured mine out? _The indolent irony won't come. He says, laconic but serious, "That isn't relevant in context."

Not deigning to reply verbally, perhaps unable to, Sasuke moves towards him with a different kind of grace. He's moving like prey.

It's the first time Kakashi's seen it, but with master predator Itachi in the family it's really no surprise Sasuke has mastered the art.

This does nothing to improve the situation.

He is aware he should move away, even as he knows it's hardly ever wise to give ground with these brats. Should not remain here, half-sitting on a rock and staring down over the edge of the mask into his student's face.

He's aware of much he should do and think and feel. It hasn't mattered since his mother died.

"You know what I want," Sasuke tells him with conviction and slightly accelerated breathing.

"Chidori isn't for everyone," Kakashi cautions fairly coldly.

Snort, irritation registering on the features but not diminishing the strange allure that clings to them suddenly, with this shift in reality. Is this some kind of genjutsu?

"I'm not everyone," Sasuke declares. "Nor am I anyone." The boy is past the point of arrogance, staring at him with those bereft dark eyes – Obito's eyes, Itachi's, my own. Distantly he remains aware that he should move. "I can learn it," Sasuke continues, dead determination to his voice, looking up through his lashes. Sometimes Sakura does that, but it never seems to matter when it's her. "What's the price?"

And Kakashi is still lost, kicking and screaming his way out of some unknown depth of emotion, registers the rhetorical ring to the question with a certain damning kind of resignation. Itachi fucked this kid up something unbelievable. Kakashi hasn't helped.

He vows, hastily but very sincerely, still aware he should move, vows not to think about what and how Sasuke knows that makes him thread his fingers through bushy silver hair and fist them, stand very close on his tiptoes.

If Kakashi had been able to display stern kindness, this would be the time. One of his usual condescending comments would also be welcome.

It's definitely not in any teacher's manual to allow your students to kiss you. You don't need to have read the manual to be clear on this.

Isn't this fucking hilarious, gallows humor of the best kind? He read porn when he was twelve. His student, who isn't one for novels, molests his teacher.

It would have been so much easier if it had been one of the others, if it had been a crush or honest lust. Kakashi could have dealt with that, pushed barriers between thoughts and people that should not connect. Instead Sasuke has to speak a language Kakashi is fluent in: a little bit of a crush, a healthy dose of lust, and the crude dealings of someone whose insides have twisted around themselves until the endings are nowhere in sight. Underneath the underneath; he can't look away, doesn't much want to see.

Sasuke kisses him like he means it, and he still hasn't moved. Is something approaching relived that his lack of experience with preteen kisses spares him the obligation to consider this one overly strange.

He is aware obsession is unhealthy, for both of them. He doesn't move, until it is over, when Sasuke looks a question at him out of feverish (scared, hot, lost) black eyes. Then he says some rather stupid things to a rather stupid student, out of a mouth that still tastes of what it shouldn't like.

He says some stupid things and thinks a little, and they make peace, of a kind. After he stopped being Whitefang's song and the Fourth's pupil, teammate of lost Obito and forgotten Rin, the best and worst ANBU in decades, he has been Sasuke's teacher more than anything else. It beats being defined as Gai's eternal rival, at least.

He is also, he has come to realizes with a certain amount of weary reluctance, unforgivably in love with the boy.

Not much later Sasuke masters the Chidori, stands there a perfect perverted reflection of everything I should have done and everyone I could have loved, all my many lost chances. It doesn't make much sense, but if you look for sense in this world you're embarking on a hopeless quest. He learned that, long ago.

They're both obsessed, and so fucking stupid, and ruined already. What is one more sin, one last chance to want and take and have and lose, in the end?

(redemption is for pussies, obito said once, and he laughed)

He wakes with Anko constituting coarse likeable reality at the beside, a world away and more from Sasuke in the mountains and Sasuke in the Country of Water, smiling and spitting and sneering, above and below and around him at every turn, past and future and present.

Loss is not new to him; nor entirely unwelcome.

(maybe pussies aren't so bad)

xxxxxxxxxx


	33. When All Else Fails

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 33:**

"**When All Else Fails"**

With the reluctant decision to let serious action against Sound wait until the former Orochimaru has had a shot at subduing them, hardships increase with unfortunate predictability.

The day the attack comes Naruto is dizzy with lack of sleep, sees the worlds in blurred shades of color and chakra. Free time in between missions is a long-lost and would-be-devoutly-missed-if-he-but-had-the-energy phenomenon, and what little time he gets in bed is disturbed by Sasuke, who rests fitfully if at all and is growing steadily more unbearable as the due date draws closer. Naruto has asked himself both once and twice why the hell they're still living together, because insufferable as it was without Sasuke, right now things aren't much better with him. Everything just hurts all the time, the ardency and the dulled barbs and the too-sharp touches.

He's just outside Tsunade's office, waiting to hand in the report on his last mission, when the alarm sounds. Not a small one, not a degree, but the full-blown howling, the large gong-gong at the village's central plaza being hit again and again by a grown man with strong arms.

_Oh hell_, he thinks, and freezes for a second; debating whether to run outside or into the Hokage office to get what info and instructions he can. How precious, I'm growing up at last, planning ahead.

"Naruto!" Tsunade exclaims, stepping out into the corridor with Shizune on her heels. Crises, as always, makes her short and clipped, talking in info dumps like a grade-schooler. "We don't know who's mounting the attack, but its' definitely happening: hurry out."

He nods, fast and sharp, and if Kyuubi had not enhanced his hearing he would not have known she said anything more. Even now he can't distinguish the words.

Runs towards free air, out into chaos: the civilians are being evacuated, but not very efficiently since every ninja who could help with the procedure is moving towards the walls. Pitted against an opposing force of the size indicated by the gong-gong, no one's going to live if we lose anyway.

_Sasuke can take care of himself_, he thinks, and jumps atop the battlement. Looks out onto a horde.

A minute until they hit, less.

"Well, shit. _Taiju Kage Bunshin no Jutsu_!" (jiraiya will have already summoned gamabunta)

Time moves in waves, after that. Snapshots of awareness thrown randomly into the continuous maelstrom of lethal intent and the power needed to back it up.

He fights hand to hand with a few enemies, feeds some lordling or other a Rasengan; stands atop Gamabunta's head to scream his defiance, the rage of the village, and jumps down anew into the madness. Sees red, literally, because there's a gash in his face for a moment, just below the headband, and a few drops of blood hit his vision before it heals.

After that his eyes are red for an entirely different reason.

There is no possibility to gain an overview; he spots Tsunade's summon in the distance, fights back-to-back with Kakashi for some amount of time, but mostly goes with the lone hunter routine of killing everything he can get his hands on (i killed my first man in a forest, when i was a child hunting bandits and thinking about the hyuuga wedding; i killed before time was born, before the concept of death had been invented, and it was all life).

The one thing he was ever truly good at, perhaps.

(definitely the one thing kyuubi was ever truly good at, and the line between us is blurring acutely, smearing broken across my mind)

He feels he might pass out from chakra overload but can't allow himself unconsciousness, has to release his grip on control, allow Kyuubi to infest his mind in order to handle the crazy amounts of power he throws around. The demon smiles; I can feel my mouth moving.

People scream a lot. Naruto roars. The whisker scars are burning holes in his cheeks, branding him to the very bones of his skull.

("_they are merging, now. there will be no turning back_")

An indeterminable eternity later he's standing panting just outside the walls, alone save for the dead, and daylight's bright on the remnants and on his shaking hands/paws, though he was certain, last he looked, that it was stars lightening his struggle.

He should go back inside, then, see what's happening (see who's dead, only don't allow yourself that thought with madness quite this close). Kyuubi twists his face.

They stumble through the main entrance of the hospital and further up the stairs, to where he knows most of the healers usually are. It's as chaotic here as it was on the battlefield, even more people screaming, white walls drenched in blood.

And then he's on the third floor, and there's a vision.

"Sakura-chan," he says, and she turns at his voice so she must be real, and there are tired lines in her face and much redness on her hands, but she is whole and she is here and she is alive. "Sasuke?"

Her face goes taut and Naruto thinks, _Oh_, and Kyuubi is everything inside him, he is being un-made, erased from the world.

Then she relaxes, forces her features calm. "He's fine, Naruto. I promise."

And _thank god_ doesn't even begin to cover it, and the sun is shining outside and time is spinning onwards and his heart is beating again.

"I'm sorry," she says then. "Are you hurt? No? Then I'm afraid you need to get back out. The battle's still on, and they need help, though I think we are winning. It's worst on the other side of the village from the original attack, now."

He nods, gone far beyond the reaches of speech.

This had better turn out alright, that's all he has to say.

xxxxx

"Hell," Shikamaru says, dodging another shuriken and deciding he doesn't have the chakra to waste on a Kage Mane no Jutsu. Not right now, not for this single man. He gestures to Chouji. "We're close enough. We're getting Uchiha."

"Really?" Hinata's sister asks.

"Really," Shikamaru affirms, cold. "When all else fails, he still has the Mangekyou."

It's funny the companions you end up with when a battle starts. When you're stuck defending a path into the village because some enemies broke through, and Ino's gone somewhere but Hyuuga Hanabi stumbled upon you, and beggars can't be choosers, so someone needs to slip into the nearby Uchiha Compound and see if the owner's still there.

"You go," Hanabi says. "I can hold this road. You stand a better chance of convincing him."

He nods, reluctant. She can fight like a cornered demon, even if her eyes are wild with something that could be fear beneath the killer intent. "Stay with her, Chouji."

He isn't sure which one of them he's trying to protect by saying that.

Hurries towards his goal, not thinking about team or family or girlfriend, and soon runs into a furious and very obviously pregnant Uchiha Sasuke kicking a man between the legs, not letting the stranger get up before he lands a kunai in the unknown throat.

Red eyes turn his way. "Nara. What the hell?"

"Fight," he replies. "Come with me."

The briefest of deliberations, followed by a curt nod.

It's a bad situation, but not an impossible one. Chouji's a Genin but an experienced one, Shikamaru's a solid Chuunin, and although still green Hanabi is a Hyuuga genius and a Jounin.

Uchiha's a bit of a joker, he supposes. Nine months pregnant and looking frankly sick, but frankly enraged too. Shikamaru's wary about that last. _Sakki_, he is soon reminded, does not require chakra, and the bloodlust Uchiha leaks is paralyzing. The only setback, although regrettably it is a considerable one, is that many of their enemies have higher tolerance than Uchiha's temporary allies.

Still, not hopeless.

This is their village, after all, where they know every nook and cranny, are fighting for loved ones as well as for their lives.

"Right," Shikamaru says at length. "We're done here. We need to move on."

He doesn't need to look at Chouji to be certain of his consent, does anyway for reassurance. Hanabi nods, impassive, retrieves a few kunai and shuriken from the corpses. Uchiha mirrors the movement, as fast and decisively as he can in present circumstances. Unlike Chouji he most definitely is not accustomed to being bulky; it's a damn eyesore that he's still stealthier than the average Chuunin.

"Alright," Shikamaru says again. "Let's go, then. Hanabi, you're in the lead. Uchiha and I in the middle. Chouji, take the rear."

They are well inside the forest when trouble finds them. Of course there wouldn't be much point to their presence if they did not make any aggressive moves, but Shikamaru isn't one to look for more problems than he can help, shouldn't have ended up in this situation: Hanabi's eyes are a blessing, his lazy brain is finally activated, but things spin out of control in large-scale battles endangering everything you care for.

He glances around out of the corner of his eye: the six men they initially ambushed, joined now by eight additional enemy ninja. Nine of them left standing.

What good is thought, when you cannot implement it into action? They need raw power for him to direct, some measure of strength to execute a strategy. Neither he nor Chouji fights particularly well; it doesn't usually burn. Admittedly he's glad it's Hanabi here with them and not Ino. Temari would have been better, but the Hyuuga girl isn't a bad replacement, all things considered.

I need to think faster. The prodigy child might have a shot, will almost definitely survive, but Shikamaru would really rather prefer for all of them to get out of this mess breathing.

The leaves are green above them, sunlight filtering through. Shikamaru stares at it, during the last second of respite before the victorious charge. Glances briefly at his team, directing a last disgusted look at Uchiha: do it now, whatever you can, we're out of options.

Aware he can't fight properly, hating Nara something fierce, Sasuke recognizes that _sakki_ will not be enough, not remotely, and that Naruto will not come. Anyone would do, anyone who could fight Sasuke's way out of here. He goes through his options: clones would fare little better than he, genjutsu are too uncertain. He needs someone else to win this for him, and he will only have one jutsu to make that happen (stood upon the head of a snake, facing tsunade and jiraiya with no use of his arms).

Once will be enough. He says, "_Kuchiyose no Jutsu_!"

"Shit," Shikamaru mutters laconically, rolling under a man's arm and kicking him in the stomach when he is distracted by Uchiha's technique.

Everyone's focused on it now, in one of those peculiar stillnesses that occur during long battle.

Chakra visibly drains out of Uchiha before several exceptionally large reptiles crowd the clearing, enlarging it by crushing trees under their sheer weight. He almost winces, when he catches sight of Uchiha pale and shaking and translates the look the grandest snake is directing at him: challenge. Unsurprising, given that Shikamaru is very certain the only thing preventing Uchiha from toppling over is his spiteful refusal to allow anyone the pleasure of watching him go down.

The incest baby is practically ready to be born: must have an evolved chakra system of its own, will interpret Uchiha's use of chakra as an attack and will retaliate, however primitively; and has excellent access to every internal organ in its mother's body.

Fuck you if the snakes turn on us, Uchiha. Drowning in a monster reptile's stomach acid is not the way to go.

He won't have to worry about it: Uchiha forces his chin up, stares the snake down with haughty red eyes and an ashen tint to his skin (_the mangekyou sharingan, the ultimate bloodline limit, heirloom of the olden gods, the master technique which none can withstand..._).

"Do not even consider it," he spits, very nearly unhinged. "Or I swear I will…!"

Shikamaru does not know Uchiha Sasuke particularly well (too well, all the same) and is perfectly aware he means it. Seems the reptiles aren't idiots, either. While they amuse themselves splattering the forest with enemy intestines, filling their stomachs with screaming opponents, he sneaks across to Uchiha. Chouji and Hanabi will be fine, can find their own way through the mess; Uchiha's expression is a frighteningly composed blank, his eyes wild and yellow. Shikamaru has the sudden and entirely unwelcome suspicion that the considerable chakra output triggered a process that should not have been pushed to begin, not here and not now.

Sasuke breathes shallowly, reigning in crazed animal impulses. "Go," he orders harshly. "We're no use to each other anymore."

Shikamaru studies him for a second, then nods sharply and beckons for the other two. Escorting Uchiha to the hospital would be the chivalrous course of action, but he's not suicidal. Even at the best of times Uchiha is paranoid and arrogant, desperately anxious not the let anyone catch him helpless.

"This way," he mutters to Chouji, increasing his speed. Uchiha can handle himself: the snakes will not turn against him. (not yet, at any rate)

Nobody argues. Hanabi's ten years old, spoiled.

Leaf is at war, though. She must have killed people before, left people behind before; he'd be surprised if she hasn't worked mostly A-ranks since she made Jounin. Would have been surprised she doesn't argue, otherwise.

Everyone past Chuunin knows that wants and needs rarely if ever coincide.

As fast as they are gone Sasuke collapses to his hands and knees among the gratuitous carnage, blind for it as he forces his breathing under control in the dark red world, fingers catching in grass and soil slick with blood. Slowly he manages to stand, painfully and humiliatingly hunched over, heart thudding fitfully.

He gestures impatiently for the snakes to be off, staring at their retreat with the Mangekyou Sharingan before forcing himself forward. Some measure of concealment, of safety, is required. Panicking isn't, so he doesn't.

xxxxx

Kakashi stumbles into the relatively secure zone that is the hospital when the first evening is turning into night. It's the second time in less than as many months that he makes the trip, in danger of over-straining his Sharingan yet again. Obito's eye and the remaining damage from the disastrous mission with Naruto will ascertain that he is of no use to anyone if he doesn't rest up, however shortly, before he heads back out.

Their losses are grievous, but then losses always are, and Gai is perfectly capable of handling what Kakashi left him. Mainly minions, after they felled the Akatsuki who tried his luck against the so-called eternal rivals of the springtime of youth.

He makes a face, of amusement and pain and exasperation, feeling the red eye pound. Dealing the killing blow to the enemy warlord cost him more than he'd have liked, a price extracted in renewed complaints from bones too recently healed.

His regrettably extensive experience of hospitals, particularly during times of war, does not make for a good incentive to enter, but want has been inconsequential for some time. Predictably the hallways are lined with injured people, grieving civilians and wounded ninja. He walks past them without stopping: the trick is to look, not to see.

Rather, that was what he told himself when he was young. At age twelve he simply stopped caring what he saw. At age fourteen this started to disturb him, and he took up the mantra again so he could pretend.

Then he spots Asuma's fat pupil slumping over a cut in his ample stomach. Chouji, his name might be.

He tries it and gains the boy's attention; probably it was correct, or his teacher voice has become more effective than he thought. "You were with one of mine earlier," he recalls. "Everything alright on that front?"

"Don't know," Chouji says miserably, in the pained voice of someone used to having a friend doing his thinking for him. "Uchiha told us to leave him, after he summoned the snakes this morning. I think he was, you know – that he was going into labor." The round face, pale with blood loss, gains a momentary pink flush. _We left him there._

Yes, Kakashi thinks with extreme detachment. I wondered about the snakes. Knew Sasuke shouldn't have.

"Where is he?" he demands in the perfectly pleasant and controlled voice he uses when he tortures people for information. He'd forgotten, for a moment, what it sounds like. Forgotten everything, for this one heart-stopping instant. "Did he get to the hospital?"

"Not that I know of," Chouji says helplessly. "But he could've. I only just got here two hours ago."

Sasuke, the stubborn arrogant little shit, is probably the only one who hasn't realized he couldn't give birth unassisted even if Leaf weren't under attack.

The air outside a hospital is usually light, liberating; he breathes with effort, stares at his own hands, summoning Pakkun. "Uchiha Sasuke," he tells the dog immediately it turns up with the customary disgruntled mien. His urgency, he suspects, is palpable, needs not be spoken of. He is tense, far away, in the place where ironic distance has failed you and nothing is particularly amusing. In the space between coping mechanisms.

"I've got the scent," Pakkun says with that sardonic calm so like Kakashi's own, the one that irritated him so comprehensively when he was fourteen and initially encountered the summon. "I remember."

They follow Pakkun's nose, not stopping for battle. It remains apparent, as he ducks into the trees, jumping branches, that their attackers, regardless of identity, underestimated Leaf quite gravely. He kills two men from behind, waiting as Pakkun sniffs into the wind, glimpses Morino Ibiki and Inuzuka Kiba, leaves the rest of the enemy squad to them.

They are alert and quiet, he and Pakkun: both well aware that trouble typically increases in proportion to Sasuke's closeness.

Gradually Pakkun slows down, in the way that means whoever he's tracking has run circles, laid traps. But Pakkun has failed targets for more spectacular than this one, a lone genius in a great hurry; in labor, in pain.

"In there," the dog reports with heavy confidence, pointing a paw towards the very slender maw between two large rocks.

Obito's eye is not necessary for seeing through the sloppy genjutsu. It's worse than those Kakashi attempted when he was thirteen. Also it is lucky he's not much thicker than he was at that age, unfortunate that he's taller.

Working his way into the very small opening, he soon catches sight of Sasuke and feels his facial muscles spasm. The kid cuts a figure of skeleton and anger, stony hurt, curled uncomfortably between the crumbling walls of the pseudo-cave barely wide enough to cradle him. His arms and hands are scarped bloody, perspiration sticking hair to a lost ashen face.

Distance, dry, is what Kakashi usually treats tragedy with, dosing panic with practicality. With bland briskness he does some fast counting and estimates Sasuke must've been enduring labor-pains for approximately ten hours. He is quite clear, in that distant way with which he saw and knew Obito's wounds were lethal, on the fact Sasuke is not lucid, is growing hysterical from the unfamiliar pain, the surreal horror of the situation, the hated parasite breaking free at last, breaking his body in the process.

Sasuke is new to the sort of physical agony that can't be ignored or numbed down or unattended – the sort of agony you cannot turn your back on. Familiar with the helplessness, the frustration and the bitter loathing, but not in this guise and never voluntarily.

(the reckless grinding irony: take one man inside you to live, through that man's death. risk losing your life from the dead man's seed coming out of you)

The wild terror in the half-closed golden eyes is the one seen in mating, birthing, dying animals.

Kakashi reaches forward with gentle firmness, prepared for a bit of pain but gambling on Sasuke being unable to attack efficiently (not foolish enough to hope for recognition), closing a hand around the nearest shoulder to drag Sasuke towards him.

"Come here," he says, as calmly as he's able. Sounds like a fucking Zen monk. "I'm here now. We're getting you home."

"I," Sasuke hyperventilates, and thank fuck there's some kind of awareness in him. _I can't finish the sentence, because there is another spasm, a bad one, and I am biting my wrist bloody on a scream._ "Yes. Hell, oh hell."

"I've got you," Kakashi promises, prompting Sasuke to make an obvious effort and reach towards him, loan truth to the utterance.

He drags Sasuke out of the cave by brute force, careful as he can but unable to make the transition smooth. Sasuke's too clumsy, the passage too narrow. Finally the kid is out, hands locked around Kakashi's arms, legs crawling the last bit, thighs and knees scratched badly.

"I've got you," Kakashi promises again, shaking free and shifting his grip, scoping Sasuke up with some effort. The kid's heavy with child and half resisting, out of instinct and need to lash out, a back-breaking (_heartbreaking_, fuck it) burden. A piggyback ride would be simplest, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that would be too painful for Sasuke. Kakashi hefts him bridal style instead. "Hang on, arms around my neck, good brat."

Easing Sasuke into as comfortable a position as possible for both of them (which isn't very) he manages the seals to make the single clone guard he can spare the chakra for and stands for a moment, calloused fingertips stroking Sasuke's quivering neck.

"I promise," he mutters into the dark hair. "I'll get you home safe and sound." Baby talk to the mother-to-be. Jesus Christ, and I mean it. "But you need to be quiet." Translation: _I can't protect us both, this low on chakra_.

A moment's frantic search and he finds a piece of wood underneath a partially splintered tree, shrugs his shoulder awkwardly until Sasuke's face rolls away from its burial in his chest. The child (a child now, entering into motherhood) stares at him in dull incomprehension for a moment, then obediently puts the item in his mouth. Something solid to bite viciously against the horror and the screams.

Kakashi was fast before he became strong, outruns the forest without trouble. Trouble is a persistent bitch, though; finds them outside, in the clear space between the tree-line and the village wall. The path he chooses looks isolated at first, is isolated at first, but things change and his clone manages only to injure one of the three ninja now blocking their way before it is done away with.

He is forcibly reminded of carrying Rin's bleeding body through enemy land.

"Get out of my way," he orders, stalling. He often taunted his enemies, for a while, when he was ANBU and invulnerable, when it got boring if his opponents weren't taking it personally.

They laugh, predictably. Ruefully he can admit that's probably what he would have done, in their position. He also hates them fiercely. He hasn't bothered hating anyone in a long time, except himself.

"Sasuke," he calls, so tense the word comes out soft. "Can you?"

Because in order to incapacitate them all he would need the Sharingan, and if he uses Obito's eye again he will collapse.

As always, Sasuke can what he must, makes himself be what he needs to be.

His head lolls slowly as Kakashi steps back fast, avoiding a rather playful fist, splinters and red drool fogging the corners of his mouth. Expression bleak and eyes glowing red he executes a sound jutsu, a few fast seals, sloppy but sufficient, and suddenly their roadblocks are occupied screaming, hands pressed against their ears.

Sasuke presses his face back into Kakashi's chest to scream, wild and shrill and from deep inside, so Kakashi can feel the noise vibrate its way through his flesh, into his body.

The Genin set to guard the gate open it hastily after it's become very clear that he will otherwise break it down.

The hospital is a familiar nightmare, a swirling, wailing chaos of trauma (_the trick is to look at them, not to see)._ Uncaring and preoccupied, Kakashi forces his way through, no more roughly than he has to, corners an attendant and demands a doctor, in the kind of voice that is not denied. He feels lost, clutching Sasuke to him, hushing ineffectively at the boy and giving the nurse a steely, smiling ultimatum.

By the time Sakura comes for them Kakashi had hoped Sasuke would have demanded to be let down. Instead he's started chewing on the Jounin vest.

He might never have been so glad to see her, to see any healer since Rin died. Sasuke does not recognize her, lost in a mind that can no longer process reality, filter memory from present from future.

"Calm down," someone says, and gradually, shaking loose from panic, he is able to distinguish, somewhere beyond the breaking _agony_, the sensation of rough chakra-heavy hands on his face.

He inclines his head, as best as he's able, swallowing the taste of blood and wood and panic as Sakura forces a smile and says, "This way."

The brisk movement following the instruction startles him; he'd forgotten Kakashi is still holding him. It doesn't feel bad, exactly, that he is.

"Here," Sakura says, and there's a bed under him instead of cramping arms. With the necessary sharp disgust that she would never direct at a patient he orders himself to _calm the hell down_. Does, marginally, and attempts to estimate the current situation, measured out by the sick frantic beating of his heart. I am sitting on a hospital bed during what appears to be an invasion, my stomach filled with pain and with red-dark hysteria exploding through my mind.

He curls around the abdominal cramps, raging at how pathetic he is, drawing strength from pride. I've been through worse.

(liar, liar)

From across what appears a greater distance than it can reasonably be he perceives Kakashi and Sakura talking, forces himself to focus on their words.

Kakashi's voice, bland and tense. "…ten hours, I think."

Being talked about like he isn't present scares him more than he wants to admit. "It," he interjects, stopping for a moment, blinded by the desire to cut the horror off of him (out of me). "It began when I used the Kuchiyose."

"Sasuke-kun!" Sakura moans. "I _told_ you it was dangerous to use chakra!"

He gives her the best approximation of a deadly, scornful glare he can manage. Naturally just letting himself be killed would have been so much safer.

She collects herself swiftly. "Never mind," she says. "I'm sorry. It's just – we don't have a lot of equipment, not enough. We need to find a qualified doctor, this is – if it's been going on for ten hours it should almost be over, but the contractions are too far apart, much too far apart." Swallow. "So we need to find a qualified doctor, only I don't know if we can."

Sasuke closes his eyes and thinks about killing Itachi.

Time passes in bits and pieces after that, he loses track of reality. One interval lasts forever, the other only for the blink of an eye. A red eye, though that hurts too. Overall it hurts so much that it becomes surreal.

He deals with it, or tries. Walks circles through the stupid room, hits the walls with shaking angry fists, hugs himself in desperation. Bites his lower lip clean through more times than he cares to count, gets on and off the bed again and again, restlessly and uselessly trying to move so far ahead of it that the absolute _panic_ can't catch up.

It goes on and on, forever and ever, wave after red-dark breaking wave. The special worst kind, the combination mentalphysicalemotional. Scaredhurtangrylostscared.

"So who attacked us anyway?" he snaps at last, feverish, freezing, staring up into Kakashi's face without seeing it properly (doesn't matter, i memorized it long ago). Kakashi who's just caught him (again) when he stumbled over another _sharphotbad_ stab of pain.

Because admitting that everything outside this room has ceased to be of importance to such a degree that it might as well have cased to exist would be – would be bad.

And Kakashi's mouth moves, only Sasuke does not hear a word he says.

At one point Sakura comes back in, without whatever (whomever) she was trying to find this time. Shame-faced, oddly subdued, she closes the door behind her and admits, "I saw Naruto. I, I sent him back out." Swallow, again. "Told him Team Seven's fine."

"Good," Sasuke snaps, blindsided by a reawakened kind of terror. "That's good." He has to say something, his throat is refusing to keep any more sounds down and she looks as stupidly miserable as he feels.

She feels miserable, in a different way of course but miserable all the same. Twenty hours after he performed the Kuchiyose she watches in stark, contained horror as her teacher wrestles a fairly delusional Sasuke into submission, into refraining from causing himself injury.

Can't look at Sasuke's staring red-black eyes, makes the mistake of catching the weary, very level gray one instead.

"I," she says, because she must, because she knows the question and the necessary answer, the answer she can't offer. "It won't work. The passage can't widen sufficiently. He needs, he needs a C-section." If spoken by any mouth but her own she'd label this a hysterical outburst. "I can't! I'm not authorized, I can't do it! I don't know how!"

Kakashi keeps his level gaze on her for a few seconds before it must return to Sasuke, panting audibly and cursing weakly, a bundle of small distressed movements. She can't decipher the look, finds herself terrified by the possibility Sasuke might just have been coherent enough to comprehend her reply.

"Just hold on," she whispers to him, praying breathlessly, clinging to his hands, staring into golden eyes that aren't sane but are his, now. "Just hold on until Tsunade-sama can help."

"Oh," he says.

It might be merely an uttering of pain. She hopes that, horrifyingly. If it's not it's short for understanding that she has pronounced a death sentence. Her team has never liked those, defies them on a nigh regular basis, but this is… god. Oh god so bad.

"You're going to live," she babbles. "You're going to be fine, I promise. Please just hold on, Sasuke please, I promise."

"Sakura," Kakashi interrupts in a rather constricted voice. "Go have another try at finding someone who can help him."

There's no one. She knows that even before she runs haphazardly through the echoing labyrinth that is the hospital, once so familiar, the safe haven. Before all the blood came, and all the death, and she dries her tears before she goes back.

Sending Naruto away might become one of my defining regrets.

(will sasuke be too proud to have any last words for him?)

Later, more than thirty hours past the commencement of this nightmare, Sasuke draws a shallow, shuddering breath and his eyes start looking inwards, focus fleeing swiftly from reality, lids descending with a new and entirely alarming kind of lethargy.

"Hey!" Kakashi calls, rather more sharply than she has heard him speak in years. "Sasuke!" With shaking abandoned as yielding no results, he resorts to a chakra-stinging slap that snaps the hazy eyes open.

"We can't wait," Sakura realizes aloud, light-headed from how fast her heart is beating, way up in her throat. "But what can we do?" It's almost a wail. "Tsunade-sama…"

Their teacher has gone crisp and sad. "When she returns she will be drained, of no use until it's too late." The line of his mouth is strict and white under the scars his mother gave him. She has a sudden delusional impression of how he must have looked at the battlefield, a child ANBU. "We will have to cut him up ourselves."

And with the last words, so suited for the scene she imagined, she is back in the hospital, oh god we will never leave it. "But I told you," she cries, wishing she were wrong, that there was any way, any way at all. "I can't do a C-section! It's complicated, delicate, I've never even tried!"

"Not the stomach," Kakashi corrects in the absolutely inflectionless voice that so many Jounin have. "Reportedly the problem is that the vaginal passage is too narrow, hence our objective must be to widen it." He looks up, right at her, hard as stone. "I will do what must be done, and I am counting on you to heal him as soon as I have. Are we clear?"

"Y-yes," she stammers, so horrified, so relived. "But that's – we can't do that!"

"I'm not going to let him die," Kakashi replies very calmly, not sparing her any attention after the first perfunctory glance to ascertain she will not argue. He looks Sasuke in the eye, projecting calm he can hardly pretend to feel, the numbness that's invading him, leaving his mind brisk and attentive, mission-mode. "Sasuke. Do you understand?"

He looks dying, Sakura thinks helplessly. Pasty and awash with sweat, mouth and hands bitten bloody.

Promptly looking impossible sicker he forces out a weak, frustrated, "Do it."

Kakashi nods sharply. "Can you numb him down beforehand?"

She can't even be embarrassed, right now, that it's such an enormous, indescribable relief that every decision is out of her hands. She needs only comply.

"I don't have much chakra left," she says. "Healing him will be complicated."

That'd be a no.

"Prepare yourself," Kakashi tells her, and plucks a kunai from his belt. Black and brutal, beautiful in its grim efficiency, it is utterly out of place in the hospital.

He is standing between Sasuke's legs, slicing clothes open and then – other parts. Parts that aren't clothes at all, aren't meant to be in contact with metal blades.

She has been this terrified, entered into this state when horror is everything in the world and you can be at peace with it because there is nothing else and you can't even imagine anything better anymore, exactly one other time in her life (_country of the wave_).

He cuts cleanly, a master butcher. A killer surgeon, someone said once, gallows humor again.

Head thrown back, muscles in tense relief like ropes underneath the skin of his neck, Sasuke screams, a raw thick sound that never stops, a single syllable.

Sakura thinks: _N as in Naruto._

Kakashi thinks:_ N as in niisan._

Sasuke doesn't think at all.

Screams, and pushes, and goes into the pain and through and beyond, into a strange dizzy world far detached from regular reality as he has known it. There is the red pulse in the darkness, like he's trapped inside a Tsukiyomi; except that's not supposed to be a relief.

Kakashi grabs the baby, gentle gentle fingers locking around the little body and pulling it out from the torn horror or birth. Unable to look, unable not to see, Sakura takes his place, bites her tongue on unworthy noises, faced with a mess of ruptured tissues, flayed meat, her fingers aching with healing chakra.

Her work doesn't knot up perfectly. Far from it, in fact: she is stressed and exhausted, unschooled in the proper techniques for mending nerves, delicate tasks. It is whole, no longer bleeding and safe from infection, that sensitive ruined area, but that is all she can manage.

Only then, proud and trembling and despairing, does she turn, and, after a slow blink, allow herself to discover that the child's eyes are a rich crimson.

I was expecting blue, she thinks with a strange sort of desperation. All babies have blue eyes, at first. No one's born with red eyes.

"Here," Sasuke says, ghosting the displeased syllable over broken lips, and she realizes with an ache inside that he's too damn stubborn to admit he can't speak.

Kakashi steps forward obediently, easing Sasuke into a half-sitting position and curling his leaden limbs around the child.

For a moment he looks only strange.

I offered to take it, she remembers with peculiar distance. Is grateful, in a way, for the insight that strikes her the next instant, when the baby makes a noise and Sasuke's eyes spill over at last: that that won't be necessary, or even possible.

Itachi's child (_my child_) the hated parasite, the traitor murderer's leavings, is in his arms, staring at him, and wave after wave after breaking wave of love washes over him, washes him under.

(he doesn't think: stupid hormones)

Many hours later Tsunade enters the room to stare impassively at the littlest Uchiha with the impossible eyes. Strong strain, on both sides, for greatness and madness both, the double legacy of the Bloodline Limit he was (improbably) born with.

Amazingly, given everything, the infant is quite healthy, judging by the preliminary exam.

She chances to ask, tired and victorious, "What are you calling him?"

After a dreamlike moment of silence Sasuke says, with the stunning calm certainty of those drugged, "Itachi."

xxxxxxxxxx


	34. Übermensch

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 34:**

"**Übermensch****"**

At long length he stumbles back to the hospital, dizzy, unsure how long he's been fighting but swallowing around the knowledge he's been doing it almost exclusively on Kyuubi's chakra nearly from the start. Good opponents, and so goddamn many of them, and the demon _pushed_, and Naruto was fighting a three-front war, suddenly. Against the enemies, against the immortal parasite, against his nausea.

"Go home," Jiraiya told him. "The seal won't hold for this. 'Sides, there aren't many of them left, you'll be more of a hindrance than a help."

Naruto nodded, too tired almost for the movement, and went. Stumbled. Nearly took his own legs off, jumping over the village wall.

Is here at last, and figures he'll just have to make sure Team Seven is still fine, then he's going to sleep like the dead for a week.

"Excuse me," he mutters to the stressed young man at the reception desk. "I'm looking for my team. You have any inkling where they are?"

"Er. Yes. Room 589. Fourth floor."

Really? "Thanks."

After some difficulty he finds the door, eases it open – stops; stares.

Never in his life has he seen Sasuke so miserably weak, stretched out limply in what is plainly not a comfortable position, his breathing uncoordinated like it's a big effort.

Suddenly I am not tired at all anymore.

Out of the corner of his eye he registers Sakura-chan rising from the edge of the bed, Kakashi turning from the window with something in his arms; the abrupt flatness of Sasuke's abdomen; a white room, bleached and poorly lit. I see only Sasuke.

Bends over him, colors moving strangely in his vision from what might be exhaustion or shock. Sasuke's hazy, unfocused, bleeding lips moving a little and mutely.

"It was a complicated birth," Sakura-chan says behind him, and he startles after all. Could not have pictured the child as an autonomous entity.

"Oh," he breathes, and Sasuke tenses acutely as he straightens. "Can I – see it?"

Feeble fingers grab at his hand: he looks down to see Sasuke's eyebrows furrow with what appears great effort, sound actually escaping his mouth now, though no true words.

"Of course," Sakura-chan says meanwhile.

"No," Sasuke husks. "Wait. No."

Remembers last time he couldn't move and Naruto looked down at him with red-tinted eyes. How wild it was, and savage, and how much it hurt, the helplessness. Chokes on panic at the thought the child can't do shit to defend itself, and Sasuke himself can't either, right now: if Naruto were to snap–

"What?" someone asks, protests, but he's so far into the fear now, splintered calculations on getting Naruto out of the room before disaster strikes, that he can't tell whether it's Naruto or Sakura speaking. "Sasuke…"

Then there is Kakashi's hand on his face, cool fingertips against his cheek, calling attention, demanding he calm down enough to give that, and their old teacher says, "It's alright. We're all here."

Translation: he won't do anything in front of Sakura that she can't stomach.

Which saves the child, and you know, at least you do know that he wouldn't hurt you when you're helpless, when you can't hit back.

His throat hurts; he doesn't speak again. Lets his fingers fall from Naruto's hand without voiced protest as the blond and Kakashi approach each other.

"Here," Kakashi says, mild glint to his eye, like he's amused by this, dead serious weariness over the rest of his face, like he knows he shouldn't be, and he lifts the blanket away from the child's face. Revealing the eyes to the light in the room. "Naruto, meet Itachi."

Naruto wishes he didn't have to realize. Stops, freezes, wracked by feverish cold. His body doesn't answer to him, hangs limp. His face is burning, bleak, unmovable.

Red eyes, Sharingan eyes, and Itachi (another itachi) was called a genius for activating his at age eight.

"Right," Naruto says, doesn't recognize the hard scratchy voice as his own, wavering sickeningly on the last syllables: "Named for his father, I see."

(i don't want you to know that)

(i can't tell you)

(it's none of your business)

"Named to know what he has to surpass," Sasuke says, and Naruto doesn't recognize his voice either, now it sounds the same as his own. Grim, with too many regrets for lament. For forgiveness?

He turns on his heel and walks briskly away.

(because i _do_ know what i'd do)

Outside he is blinded by the sun, clings to a wall because he isn't absolutely certain what is up or down anymore. Kyuubi roars, so loudly he can't hear anything at all beyond the demon's power and his own scream of defiance, of denial, of cheated rage and pain, doesn't notice Jiraiya until the man's hand has closed around his shoulder and he whirls clumsily around to look into the tried, annoyed face.

"Naruto," he says, gruff, not releasing him. Naruto forces himself not to snap the hand that holds him, snap every one of its bones, _snap this whole stupid world and make something better with the pieces that are breaking apart anyway_. "Stop scaring people. C'mon."

And he has no place to go and no energy to protest, follows the man with his head down, allows the Sannin to direct him into a house and up a flight of stairs and to a bed.

Feeling the soft pillow under his face, the mattress grumbling below his weight, the warmth of the blanket over his back, he thinks he might be in love.

He wakes up a great many hours later, and feels better until he remembers certain things and goes faint, angry. Scared of himself, and ashamed; and angrier.

(there was a reason i didn't go to iruka-sensei)

He sneaks down the stairs and into the kitchen, finds Jiraiya passed out on a couch in the adjourning room.

"Jeez," he mutters, walking up to him, arranging the slipping blanket. Watches the open, snoring face and the scabby white hair, like he watched the worn glory during the battle earlier, and adds, mild suddenly, soft and raw, "You didn't have to look out for me, you know."

Deep in sleep Jiraiya doesn't reply beyond a disturbing smacking sound, and Naruto smiles, as best as he's able which isn't much, and pads back into the kitchen to raid the cabinets. His stomach is aching around hunger; he fumbles around with bread and coffee Jiraiya definitely owes him after stealing his wallet on most every mission that's taken them to populated areas for the last few years.

Only later, sitting at the table with the old crumbs, where the sunlight falls in from the wrong side, does he allow himself to remember why this isn't right.

That it's the wrong food in the wrong house with the wrong company, in fact.

(_named for his father, i take it_

_named to know what he has to surpass_)

He makes a sound between sob and moan and curse and buries his face in his arms, can't face anything at all, not even the empty cup before him (particularly not myself).

"Hey," Jiraiya says at long last, ambling into the room and forcing him to look up with bleary eyes. "Whassa matter?"

Hearing the elder man shuffle around behind him, brewing more coffee and stuffing his face with something, Naruto knows he shouldn't speak but doesn't care. "Sasuke's child," he says. "It's born. It's Itachi's."

"Huh," Jiraiya says after a pause and some chewing. "Guess we'll have to get rid of it, the faster the better."

Naruto is vaguely surprised, beyond the demon-laced fury, that he has moved. It's the second time in his life that he's holding Jiraiya by the throat, aching fingers around a meaty neck, and he's just as disgusted as he was the first time (as unable to let go).

"Anything you do to Sasuke's child," he says, shocked to find he means it, as much as he has meant only a few things in his life (it's the promise of a lifetime!), "I will do to you. Are we clear?"

"Naruto," Jiraiya says, and it's tired and disappointed and a warning. "Let me go. Be realistic."

"I am," Naruto says, and doesn't. "Sasuke and I are what we are, to each other. I'm not letting you do anything to a helpless kid, and don't even think about touching his. Am I making myself clear?"

Jiraiya attempts to tug loose; Naruto won't allow it.

"Release me," the Sannin demands again. "I'm going to have to talk this over with Tsunade. It's not your business."

"Yes it is. My business more than anyone's save Sasuke's, actually."

"Really? Why are you here, then? Why can't you even stand to look at him, or the kid?"

Naruto's fingers tighten, before going lax. He looks down, at the floor, at the dirt, at his feet.

"'S what I thought," Jiraiya mumbles in disgust, exasperation. Tugs loose rather more gently than Naruto could have expected, takes a large swig of coffee.

"You're wrong," Naruto mutters, doesn't quite believe himself. Then he says, "I'm going," and does.

The hospital is marginally calmer today, with almost all the injured ones cleared away from the corridors. He's grateful, in retrospect, that he was too hurt and upset to register them yesterday.

He thought the way was etched into him, wired into his nerves, but takes a wrong turn and has to backtrack before he finds the door marked 589.

I can't open it.

Stares mutely at the crack beneath it, at the sparse gray light seeping through, can't do anything more at all, has to concentrate to get his breathing right.

Turns, after some time, and walks morosely away.

He still can't find his way out, but he does recall how to get to the office Sakura-chan frequents; figures he can hide out there for a bit, rest his eyes, rest my thoughts.

It's empty and he closes the door behind him, sinks down into the comfiest-looking chair, situated behind one of the large desks, and tries to stop thinking as he lays his head down and watches a spider working at its web in a corner of the room.

"Naruto," a soft voice says, and he scrunches up his nose, puzzled, before he realizes he closed his eyes, slumbered, and can open them again, groggily, to find a haggard Sakura-chan bent over him.

"Sakura-chan. Hey."

"I'm sorry I lied to you," she says, hastily, sincerely. "I thought I had to. I'm so glad you're safe."

"Hmm?" he asks, sleepy still, trails off as she bends a little further and presses fast, ardent kisses to his whisker scars.

"I'm glad you're safe too," he says, can't find words for how desperately much. "But what d'you mean, you lied to me?"

"When you asked me, during the battle, about Sasuke. And I said he was fine. He wasn't. Obviously."

"But…?" _I saw him, he was alive, he even bitched at me._

"It was a… a difficult birth. I was certain, for a while, that I'd lost him."

He feels himself go a little wild around the eyes.

"But he's fine now, right? Right?"

"As fine as can be expected," she replies, pushes at him until he sits back, until there's room for her to sink tiredly into his lap. Incredible, something she's never ever done before, and he slings an arm around her hips and rests his forehead on the edge of her shoulder, smelling flowery shampoo beneath the grime. "I'd wager anything he's hurting like hell. I mean, I'm no expert healer, and I was in a hurry. I doubt I… fixed it as well as I ought to have."

"Fixed what? Did he get hurt before getting to the hospital?"

"Do you… have you heard much of anything about what happened?"

"No," he says, shortly, on an exhale that could be an exhausted laugh. "I don't even know who attacked us." (mercifully do not know the faces of all whom I have killed)

"No one does," she says. "Not really. It was an unsorted force, Sound and Rock and Mist and Grass, even a few Sand. I know for a fact Kakashi killed one Akatsuki."

Naruto nods. "Jiraiya and I handled another."

"Good. Um. Some other people – didn't make it."

He's clutching hard, suddenly. "Who?"

"Mostly ANBU, a dozen civilians. Shino. Kurenai-sensei. Asuma-sensei. Kiba's sister. Chouji's father. Tenten. Moegi."

He doesn't say anything, can't. Is rendered stupidly wordless by terror, by relief. Survivor's guilt.

"So," Sakura-chan goes on, shaky but not so much. "I've gathered Sasuke was still in the Compound when the attack started, and he was alright until – well, until he performed the Kuchiyose no Jutsu and the chakra output pushed him into labor." She pauses briefly to fasten hair behind her ear, ruffles his as well, soft girl-hands fluttering over his face. "Kakashi dropped by the hospital and found Chouji – oh. He's badly hurt, too. They don't know if he'll make it. Shikamaru is in bits about it."

"Of course," Naruto says. "Shit. Oh, _hell_. Ino? Temari?"

"They're both fine, comparatively. Fought together, actually. I think they like each other better now."

"Thank god," he mutters.

"Yes," she says. "Yes, thank god. And, well, Chouji let slip what happened to Sasuke, they'd teamed up briefly earlier, and Kakashi set out to look for him. Found him, too, and brought him in, only there was just me to try and help, all the other medics were busy, and I'm not – I've never been taught how to do that!" Her voice is rising in panic, before she smoothes it down forcefully. "We had to – cut him up. Or Kakashi did, I couldn't even bear to watch."

"Cut him up," Naruto echoes, shrill, strangely numb again.

"Cut him up," she repeats, as though whipping herself with the words. "You know – down there. That's what I'm not sure I healed right."

Naruto fights the impulse to cross his legs in protection – that'd knock her away, and he doesn't think he could stand them being a millimeter further apart.

"It's Sasuke," he says. "He's a tough bastard. You did your best. He's alive, he'll be alright."

"I hope so," she says. "He was in rather a hurry to change back into his old body."

Naruto startles, realizes it's stupid not to have thought about that, obviously Sasuke will want to wear his real body again. He's just gotten used to Sasuke being girl-shaped (has never even seen male sasuke older than twelve, never – never a lot of things). Bloody stupid thought, not like it should matter.

"Has he?" he asks.

"No. I advised him not to. It's a specific instance of the transformation jutsu that has been pregnant, so I don't know whether he'd have any milk if he performed it anew." She rubs at her face, tired. "He doesn't seem to have much of that in any case, so I reckon he can switch back as fast as we find a working alternative to replace the breast-feeding."

"Breast-feeding," Naruto repeats dutifully, dumbstruck again and cursing himself for it.

"Oh, come on," Sakura-chan says, lighter now, hysteria glimpsed beneath the frail bright shell. "Don't tell me you never have?"

He muffles a laugh against her neck, tilts his head back up to raise an eyebrow. Denying it would be ridiculous, of course (hello, teenage boy here, breasts are great, in his mouth or otherwise).

"Thought as much," she says, sober again, or almost. "He's so – so _weak_. No, seriously, just to use the breast-feeding as an example: someone has to open his shirt, put the baby in position, hold it there until it's done, then burp it and close the shirt again. He can talk and turn his head, that's about it."

"He's… the baby's fine, though, right?"

"Yes," she says. "Yes, Itachi is fine." And she shudders at the name, after everything. "Kakashi's been handling him, mostly – I was needed elsewhere, to help healing, and for Sasuke not to freak out it has to be one of us with him, you know what a paranoid pessimist he is. Truthfully, I think he'd rather it be Kakashi, in any case."

"Why? I mean, you're… well, you. Kakashi's the _teacher_."

"More than that, to him," she says softly, then goes on before the hurt registers. "If anything happened, I couldn't protect them," she admits, speaking fast through the smarting words. "He knows that. Moreover, he knows, or he thinks he knows, what Kakashi wants in return, which is safety, of a kind. I don't think he's ever managed to puzzle out what exactly it is that your or I or the baby want from him." She smiles, an expression of pain, old now, familiar.

"He knows what I want," Naruto says. "He has to."

"Does he?" she asks, mild as milk. "He doesn't understand selfless concepts, and you want more than the things he comprehends."

"I suppose I do. But, with Kakashi – is everything….as it should?"

"I think so," she says. "Sasuke… well, you know how he is. He expects he'll have to pay him back. I reckon he's just hoping it can wait until he's stopped hurting quite so desperately."

(_there are things you just need, and if the price turns out to be higher than you'd like to pay, that's just too bad. it doesn't change anything_)

"That's – just like him, I suppose. Horrible."

"True," she says. "But really, it had to be Kakashi – who else was there?"

He tenses so abruptly he feels it like a pain; she strokes his face, light as a breeze.

"I need to get back to work. Whatever you decide to do, I – I love you, you know?"

"I know," he says, around a smile that aches, under eyes that burn again. "I love you too."

"Of course you do," she says, slips free from his clutching hand, kisses his face again, leaves him there.

(whatever you decide to do?)

He shakes his head with a smile, rubs at his face, at his tired eyes, lies back down on the desk for a little while. He's restless now, however, knows how he'll choose.

(or that there is not, in fact, a choice to be had)

Rises after a little bit and walks slowly back towards room 589. Pauses, as Anko crosses his path further ahead and leaves the door ajar.

He approaches slowly, unwilling to spy on her and Kakashi a second time; but it's hardly spying if he's only walking up to them, albeit not as fast as normally. He honestly doesn't think he could make his legs move any more rapidly.

Anko steps into the room, looks it over, feels her face twitch and hardly bothers to fight it. Her cheek muscles always spasm, in parody of her heart's movement, when she catches sight of Orochimaru.

Even though he's laid out like a dead, right now. Lit-de-parade.

Kakashi is holding the kid on one arm, dragging Sasuke's shirt down to cover him with his free hand. Looks calm, and unfazed, not at all like a child hero from bitter war, brushing tanned fingers across Sasuke's hair, stealing it away from the worn features.

"Hey," she says, and they both turn slowly to look her way: Sasuke/Orochimaru because it is evident he cannot move faster, Kakashi because he's always annoying, presumably.

"Anko," he says, raising an eyebrow. "It's a relief to see you healthy."

She nods, composed but not by much. She wants to nurse Orochimaru, wants to murder him with her own hands.

(take me back?

let me reject you, by myself)

She decisively looks away from him, focuses on Kakashi, on the baby.

"That his?" she asks, a challenge.

"Sasuke's," Kakashi affirms. "And Itachi's."

"Sick fuck," she mutters, but with something like approval, because you do what you must and it isn't what she has feared.

Then, and this time it isn't a challenge, just a cold inquiry, cold as anything she's said: "You doing him?"

"No," Kakashi says, softly like a sigh but certain as stone. "I'm not."

"Huh," she says, and needs only give the merest suggestion of a glance towards Sasuke's limpness, on his back, with his clothes undone from the breast-feeding. At where Kakashi's fingers were soft in his hair.

He looks like hell warmed over, but you take what you can get, and love does what it does to you, I know that.

"Get real," Kakashi says. "I might as well fuck a corpse."

"Fair enough. Can I have a look at the child?"

"No," says Sasuke, and it's not like Orochimaru's voice at all, but the tone's right and it seems that's what matters after all. She turns, furious, frustrated, fearful.

He still looks like hell warmed over, pliant and precocious. A mother, huh?

"Alright," she shrugs. "Oh, Ibiki wants a word with you, Kakashi. Later."

"Later," he echoes, the adds, incredibly, outrageously, and she hasn't expected, couldn't have, not really, not here: "Looking forward to it."

"Careful, kid," she says, stepping outside and seeing Naruto, pressing a brief hand to his shoulder.

"Ah," he replies, nods faintly.

Enters the room.

"Hiya," he says weakly, just inside the door.

"Hiya," Kakashi echoes, milder than Naruto had expected. "I'll leave you alone; apparently Ibiki is pining for me. Here, take the little one."

"Wait," he protests, raising his arms in defense, deflection. "I–"

"There you go," Kakashi says with a demented kind of determined cheer, dumping the infant carefully onto Naruto. "Mind you support his neck."

"Hey," Naruto complains, but steadies his grip – already holding the baby, he has little choice. It's heavier than he expected, looking up at him with wary, very red eyes in the round, barely-featured face. "Hello, little guy."

Itachi doesn't reply, just stares at him mutely. Well, what was I expecting? An attack? Some kind of greeting or welcome?

Shaking his head, resting the baby against his chest, he sinks down on the bed.

"Give it to me," Sasuke demands, struggling laboriously but efficiently into a half-sitting position, collapsing against the pillows piled behind him.

"For god's sake, I'm not going to harm a hair on his head," Naruto says. "I wouldn't ever. Will you fucking realize that sometime?"

"That's not what it's about. Here, hand it over. You'll have to," he closes his eyes briefly, and Naruto can see what the admittance costs him, "you'll have to arrange my arms anyway."

Naruto leans forward, eases the child onto Sasuke's lap, lifting Sasuke's arms to encircle it.

Sasuke stares down at it, and his expression is mild and teary with love – brows furrowed, disgust and a wild kind of incomprehension written plainly across the tender emotions underneath.

"I can't," he says at last, thick, strangled. "It's too much. Take it away from me."

The child makes a whiny sound as Naruto sighs and aches and lifts it, and Sasuke stares at it with panic and passionate need.

Naruto just has no words. Not a single syllable.

"It's your child," he tries at last, weak.

"I know that!" Sasuke snaps, then closes his eyes briefly, asking, "Did you know that I gave it away to Sakura? Before it was born. But I – I can't."

"Of course you can't, you stupid bastard," Naruto sighs, animated again. To think there'd come a day when he'd be the wise one. "We're going to take care of this. Of it – uh, _him_."

"We?" Sasuke asks.

And Naruto is scared, before he suddenly realizes that's exactly what Sasuke is.

"We," he confirms.

Sasuke clearly lacks the energy to snort, or even to keep his eyes open. "Right," he mutters.

Sleeps, or dozes. Naruto leans forward, he too raw inside from frustrated tenderness, brushes a hand lightly across Sasuke's cheek and jaw, breathes a kiss at the edge of his mouth.

He is forcibly reminded of the kid (he couldn't have forgotten it if he'd tried though obviously he could ignore it) when it starts whining behind him.

"Hey," Naruto tries, lifting it and – well, rocking it. Him. That's what you're supposed to do with babies, right? "Hey, keep it down, okay?"

His efforts are rewarded with a rush of liquid warmth hitting his front and lap.

"Oh, crap. I was _trying_ to like you, you know."

xxxxxxxxxx


	35. Dead Weight

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 35:**

"**Dead Weight"**

Things are strange, for quite some time. The Hidden Village of Leaf survived the attack, came through kicking and screaming, but to say it's all the stronger for it would be a horrible exaggeration at best.

Besides, Naruto has to admit that the rebuilding and the crazy number of missions aren't his primary problems.

Tsunade stops by later in the afternoon, when Naruto's clothes are still wet and stinky, raising a too-pleased eyebrow at the spectacle he presents in his attempts to keep Itachi quiet and something approaching content. Actually he's starting to suspect the child's getting hungry, but trying to breast-feed him with Sasuke unconscious feels like a kind of violation, and Naruto can't bring himself to wake him up.

"Naruto," Tsunade says. "Uchiha."

Sasuke opens his eyes slowly, looking tired and tense, wrinkles deeper than before around his eyes.

Will Naruto ever wrinkle? Or will Kyuubi forever keep his skin-cells young and healthy?

Sasuke's barely sixteen, with scars from violence and age etched across his skin. Still shy of seventeen.

"We've procured substitute milk," Tsunade says, brandishing a small flask of white liquid. "It doesn't come cheap, but it's doable."

"Wasn't expecting anything else," Sasuke mutters, making a listless gesture that might be interpreted as an impatient wave.

At least Tsunade chooses to see it as such, stepping forward with a sigh to hand Naruto the precious baby-food. "Here. Try it out."

Naruto obediently puts the teat in Itachi's mouth, watching the miniscule face grow pink with the eager effort of suckling. Seems Sasuke really didn't have a lot of milk to offer.

"I still think you should let transforming back wait," Tsunade warns, "until we've confirmed that this is a worthwhile solution."

Sasuke nods, a fractional, pissed-off movement.

"Now," Tsunade continues, turning to Naruto, "as for you, there's still work."

"What?" Naruto protests, incredulous. "But we just managed the attack!"

"Exactly," Tsunade says. "Too many are injured, we absolutely need to keep a strong guard, and every last healer is required here. Nevertheless, someone has to go after the retreating enemy, take some prisoners, take their measure. You're one of the few qualified uninjured ninja we have."

"But I have things to be here for."

"I'm aware of that. Most people do. Most people can't be of any help safeguarding the village for the future. You can."

He closes his eyes, briefly. "Alright. When and with who?"

"You're meeting Ibiki, Temari and two ANBU at the main gate in half an hour."

"Fuck. Alright."

"Good," Tsunade says. "Uchiha, you're basically discharged. There's preciously little we can do for you, and we need the room."

"You can't do that," Naruto argues. "Look at him!"

"He needs to rest," Tsunade says coldly. "He can do that just as well someplace else."

"Shut up talking about me like I'm not here," Sasuke orders. "I'll be fine."

"No you won't. You can't even lift the baby."

"One of the civilians can help him," Tsunade says.

"Absolutely not," Sasuke croaks.

At the same time Naruto exclaims, "Do you want more people dead?"

They look at each other.

"Sakura-chan?" Naruto says.

"She's working," Tsunade says. "She's also caring for her parents, who were hurt during the attack."

"Kakashi, then," Naruto says grimly.

Sasuke nods; Tsunade sighs. "He will be working most of the time," she declares. "But I suppose I could give him easy hours."

"That's decided, then. Great." Naruto doesn't feel great about it, but there are only three people who can touch either Sasuke or Itachi without Sasuke freaking out completely, and someone has to do it. Kakashi looked like he probably knew approximately what he was doing with the baby, too, which is more than Naruto can readily say for himself.

"Are you still intent on handling Sound?" Tsunade asks Sasuke.

He's clearly tiring out rapidly, eyelids dropping, but manages a haughty look. Of course, Sasuke was probably born with a haughty look (except naruto remembers a child version of sasuke, glimpsed and should-have-been-forgotten, who could smile and cry).

"Yeah," he says, then almost slurs: "Need body to work first."

"Obviously," Tsunade says dryly. "I'll be sending a team with you."

"No dead weight," Sasuke demands. "And no one – delicate."

"Bloody brutal leader for a bloody brutal lot, huh?"

"Yes," Sasuke agrees. "Exactly."

"Fair enough. I'll see to it. Naruto, be on time for the mission. Uchiha, I'll send Kakashi in later."

In her wake Naruto puts the empty flask away and tries to burp Itachi (sakura-chan said something about doing that after he'd been fed, right?), who kindly responds by spewing milk all over him.

Sasuke seems altogether too pleased about this development, Naruto might add.

"So," Naruto says at last, when the kid's asleep and his jacket as clean as it's going to get just now, sitting down close to Sasuke and leaning in, a little. "Can I?"

He's not certain whether it's a conscious choice not to specify what he's asking permission for.

Sasuke gives him a suspicious look. "Why?"

"Because I want to. Can I?"

"…alright."

Naruto awards this pleasing answer with a peck on the sharp tip of Sasuke's nose, then leans his face on Sasuke's shoulder with relief's exhaustion, kissing lightly at the prominent scars on his neck.

Sasuke stares over the glaring-golden top of his head, feeling absolutely wrecked, absolutely wretched.

_What do you want from me?_

(things i can't give, for the most part)

After Naruto has left he slumbers for some time, before the baby wakes him up by being noisy. Sasuke tries to reach it but can't, has to grab desperately at the edge of the bed as the world starts spinning violently, like it's trying to shake him off.

He comes back to his senses with his head and shoulders hanging off the bed and Itachi's cries in his ears. Fuck.

Worse, he still hasn't managed to make it back into a dignified position, or to shut Itachi up, when Kakashi returns.

There are hurried, familiar steps behind him, hands around him, supporting, pulling him upright and laying him to rest against the pillows.

"Um," Kakashi says mildly, relaxing rather noticeably as it becomes apparent nothing has really happened. "Some new kind of acrobatics I haven't heard about?"

Sasuke gives him a mean look, feeling blood still pound through his head as Kakashi picks up Itachi, who calms after a bit of rocking and cooing.

Kakashi seems to have a knack for that.

I don't.

"Tsunade sent Naruto out, then," Kakashi says, mild enough. Deceptive, needless to say. "Are you well enough to leave?"

"Depends," Sasuke admits icily, "on whether I'm supposed to walk by myself."

"Hardly. Tsunade said she wants the room empty by evening at the latest; I expect I shall need to carry you."

Sasuke closes his eyes against what feels like a wet burn, so excruciatingly weak. "Anytime's fine by me, then," he says, voice tight between clenched teeth.

Kakashi places Itachi in Sasuke's lap, then gently eases the both of them into his arms. Sasuke's lost count of how many times Kakashi and Naruto have carried him around. Hasn't stopped hating the incompetence, impotence, that forces him to let them.

"I'll bring you home if you want," Kakashi offers, "but my place's closer."

"Whichever," Sasuke mutters.

No one bothers to look at them, too occupied with their own immediate misery, as Kakashi carries him up the familiar stairs and into the equally familiar apartment. All the time Itachi is an uncomfortable warmth against him, a grinding bundle of emotion.

Sasuke clings to it for some time, by instinct, then grows afraid he is crushing the child, is inexcusably relieved when Kakashi takes it away, offering it another milk-meal.

Ironically, Sasuke's never slept with Kakashi in this bed. Has lain in it several times, though. With Kakashi and Naruto both.

"I'm starting dinner after I've cleaned up Itachi and fixed him a new diaper," Kakashi says. "What can you eat?"

"Don't know," Sasuke mutters, conflicted (that is my child. itachi, son of itachi. my child). "Don't care."

"It'll be a surprise, then."

Later he wakes up and manages a few spoonfuls of soup. Kakashi has to feed him, which should be more humiliating than it is.

"Goodnight, then," Kakashi says at last. "I'll leave Itachi here with you." In the stuffed chair converted into cradle, over in the corner.

"You don't have to," Sasuke starts, bites his lip. "You're working tomorrow, it's your place. Sleep in the bed."

"You need to rest."

"And I will. Same goes for you."

Kakashi nods, bends to lay Itachi down for sleep (wonders: tsunade said she couldn't find any obvious brain damage, but he knows who the kid's parents are, and how closely related, and worries). None of this is made easier by Itachi's preternatural quiet, his unnatural way of studying the world with red eyes that are not a child's.

The same eyes as Kakashi's.

He takes his vest and shoes off, fumbles with the blanket. It is a very small bed, for two people; they sleep with Kakashi on his back to one side of it, Sasuke pressed into him, partly atop him. It isn't comfortable, but neither one is uncomfortable with it either, and exhaustion does what it does to you.

They are awakened some stray hour later by Itachi screaming away into the evening.

"Damn," Kakashi mutters, slugging out of bed.

Sasuke grumbles, looking sick. "Shut it up."

"It?" Kakashi repeats, picking the infant up, resting the little body against his ribs and rocking softly.

"You know," Sasuke replies. "The kid. That. Shut it up."

"I'm trying."

"Not very efficiently. Damn it, just put a sleeping genjutsu on it."

Not a bad idea, Kakashi considers, and does, fingers infinitely gentle, tracing ginger chakra designs on the baby's forehead.

He crawls into bed and feels Sasuke shake, thinks he would cry if he could. Kakashi holds on to him, stroking his back silently. This will be another one of those things they don't mention afterwards.

He sighs, before sleep.

Wakes early the next morning, undoes the genjutsu on Itachi and feeds and changes him before leaving for work. Thinks about making gestures with Sasuke, a simple goodbye, a kiss on his face, a hand in his hair.

Decides not to, and I don't know how anyway. Has been alone for as long as he can remember; it's a part of him.

Several hours later, when Sasuke wakes up to Itachi whining, hungry again, he feels considerably better. Still like shit, but there are degrees to that, as well. I learned that long ago.

He sits up, discovers he can do that, with some small difficulty, and ventures to swing his legs over the edge of the bed. His knees shake like upset water and he has to hold on to the bed for a while, gathering his bearings, and the place between his legs aches like fire, but he's standing. On his own two feet, and manages to shuffle over to the cradle, lift the child. Fast, before he has time to think about what he's doing, or why.

Has Itachi pressed to his chest, baby-face against his shoulder, and the world is spinning in a different way. No less dangerous, or wretched. Equally inescapable, as well.

Walking to the adjourning kitchen is slow business, harder than most trials, but he does it and rests for a time on a chair, with Itachi's noises muted in his shirt. He relaxes for a while, so tense he aches, eventually stands again and searches the cabinets, finds flasks with milk for Itachi and soup and rice that Kakashi must have left for him.

He has fed them both before he starts to panic.

Breathes so shallowly he realizes there's a real risk of him fainting, and he can't allow that when he's holding Itachi but he remains unable to stop.

Stares at the child staring back at him, reaching for him, and that wild unstoppable love from the hospital is still there, and he still has no idea what to do with it, how to stand it. It claws at him, burns through him, and he wants to scream. Can't fight this, in any way he's been trained in.

Discovers he has been careless when an infinitely small hand closes around his finger, and holds on.

_What do you want from me?_

(_what do i want from you?_)

"Oh," he breathes. Crushes Itachi to him as gently as he can, feeling the child's reflexive fumble at his breast, this fragile breathing warmth he's curling around, like it's the most precious, the only precious thing in the world. "_Oh_."

He's never been so confused, or so hurt or desperate.

Stumbles back into the bedroom, after quite some time, and falls back onto the bed, Itachi still with him. Gradually, by slow degrees, he can look at the child, touch it. Trace the undeveloped features, count fingers and toes, wonder at the smooth skin. He's never felt hide that soft, unmarred (won't last, and, surprised, he finds he can almost feel sorry for that).

Gradually, too, he is able to tolerate Itachi pawing at him, minimal hands patting at his face and throat. Curious? Possessive? Testing?

Able to tolerate it, without lashing out and without drowning the child in demands. Without killing it from hatred or from love.

It might – might possibly survive, then. Nevertheless he is grateful when Kakashi returns home to handle the mundane details of empty stomachs and dirty diapers.

"How were things?" he asks. He's having dinner in bed today too, but at least he's eating by himself, and food that demands some amount of chewing.

"In ruins," Kakashi shrugs. "Being rebuilt. Atmosphere's tense, but no more so than was to be expected."

Sasuke nods, fractionally, sips his water. "Sakura's parents? I heard they were injured."

"Their house was one of the ones partly demolished. Seems they were both trapped under the roof as it caved in, but they should be alright, with some time to rest. Her father won't walk properly again, but he has a job where that's not a requirement."

"I see."

"Here?" Kakashi asks, assembling the dishes.

"As expected," Sasuke says carefully. He honestly doesn't have a better answer.

"Ah," Kakashi says lightly.

Places another sleep-inducing genjutsu on Itachi, lies down to rest.

The next day Sasuke is better, spends only a few hours in bed. Devotes most of his time to studying Itachi, this strange child he loves and has no idea how to relate to. Familiarizes himself with the sketched face, feeds and rocks and changes the kid. Has said kid throw up on him, and gurgle at him, and stare and stare and stare.

Sharingan eyes. Chakra and talent and insanity to match them? (purpose?)

I'll find out, he supposes. Contents himself, for now, with letting Itachi explore his hand, small fingers tickling over scar-rough skin.

"Are you going to?" he asks Kakashi that night, when the shadows are growing languidly longer.

Kakashi either falters or startles. Or if it's a stillborn chuckle trembling through him.

"You're hurt."

"I just want to know what to expect."

"I don't know. What do you think?"

"I," Sasuke says. Takes Kakashi's hand, quickly, holds it in his own, slumps forward to lean his forehead against the edge of Kakashi's shoulder. "I don't know."

"It's alright," Kakashi says, free hand large and warm around the back of his head. "I won't. I don't want this to be about using, or being used. I love you. That's that. Means I love the kid too, in a way."

Sasuke has the words in his mouth that _if you so much as touch Itachi I will bloody murder you_, but owes Kakashi to swallow them down.

The fourth day he can wash off, cook for himself. The fake milk seems to work. Soon, he tells himself, soon I'll be free to change back.

It could have been funny that this incarnation of him has only ever known this body, this female pregnant body, and still he is so painfully, fearfully excited. Has memories of a long, strong body supple like a snake; of a harder, tougher version of this one.

This body that he didn't mind until the pregnancy became inconvenient but that he hates now it's so weak and pained, a prison.

It could have been funny. It's not.

The fifth day he feels like himself again, only a little tired-dim, with a weak ache lingering between his legs. He is feeding Itachi when there's a knock.

"I've been wanting to come see you," Sakura says on the threshold, when Sasuke's left Itachi in the kitchen and warily opened.

He puts the kunai away and steps back to let her in.

"How are your parents?" he inquires politely, dropping down extremely gingerly to sit with Itachi.

"Better," she says. "How is… Itachi? Can I hold him?"

Sasuke doesn't say anything, simply hands the baby over. Does feel safe with Sakura's arms cradling the child close to her, pink hair falling into his vision, her face soft.

"And," she looks up at length to ask, clearly steeling herself. "How are you?"

"I should be able to change back soon."

"Yes," she agrees. "Yes, I expect so."

It's so searchingly, unavoidably awkward, until she reaches a new decision and steps closer.

"Sasuke-kun," she says. "It's me. I'm sorry. You're very important to me."

"I know," he says, and what used to be Sasuke wasn't tactile but Orochimaru was, and physicality is easier than words, a lot of the time. He traces the side of her face, strenuous and sweet.

The sixth day is anticipation.

The seventh day Naruto stumbles back into the village, exhausted again from the mission, with blood in his nostrils, thick and familiar. It's been a rough week; the two ANBU are dead and Temari has reopened an injury. They're still alive, though, and very many enemies aren't.

Not unusually, he feels a little sick.

"I need to go to the hospital," Temari says.

Ibiki nods. "I'll write the report. Good work, both of you. Dismissed."

Surprised and gratified, Naruto takes off in the opposite direction, heading for the well-known down-scale apartment with Hatake Kakashi written in small, anonymous script on the door.

It would probably still have been a shock to see Sasuke opening it with a child resting on his hip, had Naruto had the emotional energy to muster for shock.

"Hello," Sasuke says, closing the door behind him. "If you'll take him for a moment. I was planning to change back."

Naruto is really too stupefied to react, simply stands there, feeling stupid and slow but not dissatisfied.

One second Sasuke is a delicate girl with wrinkles around her golden eyes and scars on her throat (beneath the clothes too, naruto knows).

The he is – not.

Still modestly sized, but there's whipcord muscle now, and an inch or so of additional height. The shirt suddenly hangs the way it's supposed to, with more shoulder to spread over, no breasts to crumble across.

The throat looks suddenly smooth, unmarked save for two small black lines, two serpent's teeth.

Naruto notices this in the same way people notice the brand of the victim's clothes at a murder scene.

Sasuke's eyes are black (bruise-hued, and they can reflect laughter and can cry, presumably).

_Sasuke's eyes are back._

He seems as bewildered, as… pleased? overwhelmed? satisfied? …as Naruto is.

For a moment, at least. Flexes his arms, his hands, unblemished skin over muscle and bone, supple sinuous strength, hard strength, dexterity.

The body is exactly as I left it.

He smirks, the grin-related smirk that Naruto knows for his version of a smile, except things can't be that simple for Sasuke. For either of them, really, particularly now, when he's holding Sasuke's child as he's stepping forward.

We're basically the same height, now.

He thinks, with an inward laugh, and softness, softness almost everywhere, that in a way this is just as strange as seeing breasts on Sasuke for the first time.

And in a completely different way it isn't strange at all.

Naruto is intimately familiar with every minor curve and crease of what was Sasuke's face three years ago – this visage is gaunter, paler, but very much alike. Very much itself.

Sasuke looks back, tense, mute. There is a wild joy of strength and movement in him, but Naruto's face is strange and there is Itachi to be considered, as well.

"What?" he asks, impatiently, not as sharply as he intended.

The voice does it. Deeper, practically a matured replica of the tones Sasuke employed at twelve. A much darker voice than you'd expect from such a slight youth, actually, but Sasuke's never been what he's been expected to, not in any real way.

"You," Naruto says, incoherent as usual, the dork. "Your eyes."

Sasuke's hand goes to his face, finds Naruto's there, coarse fingers on his own and on his cheek, just below his eye.

"What's wrong with them?" They work perfectly well, from what Sasuke perceives.

Naruto shakes his head, like he's being stupid. "They're right."

It actually takes Sasuke another moment to understand that, but then he thinks he does.

"It doesn't change who I am," he says, and realizes he can hardly remember how to envisage himself with dark eyes.

Or, he discovers by touch, without scars on his neck and prominent lines in his face. There are just two faint threads of what will one day become wrinkles clinging to each of his eyes, nothing more than that.

"It doesn't need to," Naruto says. His hand too is on Sasuke's throat now, curving around it, around where there should be scars. Sasuke can't decide whether he thinks Naruto is relieved or aggrieved that the nail-prints he left are gone.

Itachi cries in discontentment, and Sasuke demands Naruto hand him over. Which Naruto does readily enough, though without removing his hand from Sasuke's face, brushing his jaw now, his touch ghosting the corner of his mouth.

"You're you," he says at last, and lets the hand fall.

Time doesn't move backwards, though. Sasuke left him in The Valley at the End, merged with Orochimaru, seduced and killed his brother, is holding a child to his chest now. Not just a child; his child.

Time does move forward, though. Naruto thinks that they may yet be alright with that.

xxxxxxxxxx


	36. Proving Points

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 36:**

"**Proving Points"**

They end up in the bedroom, Sasuke propping another flask into Itachi's mouth to keep him occupied – since the diaper was clean, he must reasonably have started complaining because he was hungry.

Despite everything, the scene still throws Naruto. A smallish bedroom, light through the window, generous amounts of it, illuminating Sasuke cross-legged on the bed, looking young again and beautiful, feeding a child held competently against his body.

"So," Sasuke says after some time, not looking at him. "How was the mission?"

"Tough," Naruto says. "Lots of running after terrified people with no idea where they where going, who turned vicious when they were cornered. Temari got hurt, Ibiki and I are fine. ANBU's dead."

He pauses, staring out the window, considering things he's done and hasn't.

"Now," he starts, a little uncertain, about a great deal of things, "are you – I mean, you said before you'd take care of Sound. What exactly did you mean?"

"Depends," Sasuke says evenly, his shrug a light, joyous movement. "It'd be smartest to subdue them and bring them back as minions, but I'm not sure Tsunade will approve, or think it worth the cost."

"What cost?"

"Depends, too. Dead people, obviously. Mainly Sound, to prove the necessary points. If we do bring them here there'll obviously be trouble, deaths on both sides, first arguments and then the punishments. But they're good at killing, and that's what's needed in war."

"That's not enough," Naruto protests. "Killing is how you start a war, it's not how you stop it."

"It's hard for your enemy to fight back if he's dead," Sasuke argues. "On the other hand Sound won't be all we have, so it's a pointless discussion."

"Maybe," Naruto concedes, with a sigh. Goes to sit on the bed as well, letting his body fall back against the pillows, lies with his eyes half closed, studying Sasuke.

Sasuke who looks back every now and then, discreetly, and eventually puts an apparently sleeping Itachi away in the pseudo-cradle. Comes back, after that, and closer than he was before, leaning over Naruto so black hair brushes his face. His hand is on Naruto's arm, just below the elbow.

"I want to fight you," Sasuke says. Breathes, really.

Naruto sits back up, his expression a challenge. In Kakashi's room with Itachi sleeping there is little they can do, however. Settle for arm wrestling, face to face on the bed, elbows on knees, hands clasped and straining.

"No chakra," Sasuke stipulates, eager words, bright eyes.

It is a very even thing, wonderfully.

Naruto wins, but only because Sasuke's concentration snaps elsewhere when there's a sound from Itachi's direction.

It turns out to be nothing, a bird crying outside, and Sasuke's still on the bed when he realizes this, doesn't leave it. Actually, with the way he twisted around and how Naruto held his arm, it's the easiest thing in the world to tug him back, collapse him over Naruto.

Sasuke, who's still bright, with those impossibly missed eyes, who's never in his life backed down when it comes to Naruto.

Who is staring challenge right back at Naruto, and can suddenly seem playful even though actually he isn't, he never is, about this or anything but particularly this, and Naruto moves his hands a little, reaffirming the solider ribs, the spine that never broke, the stronger jaw.

Sasuke moves under his touch, tugging at him, pushing, pulling, and who did they think they were kidding, with the games?

Mouth to mouth, and Sasuke kisses the exact same way he usually does, teeth and tongue. His mouth is very much the same – small, pallid, but proportion-wise larger in a male face. Other things are different.

How Sasuke's torso is flat and hard against his, how he's heavier, larger, though both of these last are marginal changes. Marginal things matter, any ninja knows.

These aren't bad. His hand slips down Sasuke's side, over the thicker chest, the less pronounced waist, along the curve of a hip that hasn't changed much. Which was part of the problem, really, regarding the birth.

When his hand ghosts across the stomach Sasuke doesn't protest. Raises an eyebrow, slips a hand down the collar of Naruto's shirt, bends to kiss him anew, hard.

He's surprised and he isn't.

The abdomen is inverted again, an almost flat wall of thin muscle. Sasuke won't have to worry about protecting it carefully anymore.

Naruto pauses, in all the strangeness, hands on Sasuke's skin, reminds himself the blackish eyes are a lie.

Thinks about a certain memory, Neji wearing Sasuke's face, pressing him into a wall. He's raw and tender and hell turned-on, then and now, lost in a crazy world of regrets and the failures that prompted them.

Sasuke lost interest in sex entirely in the beginning of the fifth month of the pregnancy, sighed and snapped at Naruto to fuck off by himself more often than not. Wasn't impossible to persuade, but Naruto doesn't feel so good about that (sasuke looking grumpily the other way, cursing under his breath or obviously counting seconds, face carefully, agonizingly blank, preventing naruto from stopping – had to get a reaction first, and he didn't, and grew rougher, turned away in disgust when it was over but couldn't keep away, and sasuke never said a thing; or, he said many things, but none that mattered).

Sasuke is hardly passive-aggressive now, though. Clings to him, through the strangeness, mouth opening and closing around a soft hiss.

This is shocking innocent, the tentative stage they never tried – went from comradely fighting to sloppy sex in days (in years). Never this clothes-on fumbling, the shy comfort of a body pressing partially into another, his fingertips finding and cradling Sasuke's neck.

They are interrupted by a hard knock; Sasuke slips free, straightens his shirt and is off the bed in a single fast movement. Naruto hasn't seen it in months, that lighting-sharp control and merciless grace. He's missed it, only partially consoled by the heavier grace of pregnant-woman-Sasuke, reckons Sasuke must have been going mad for it.

Rather more slowly, he follows the Uchiha towards the door, is still approaching when Sasuke opens it and his spine tenses. The trio that has come knocking is the outside of improbable.

"Sasuke," Sakura breathes, in the kind of voice that should shake the earth. "Sasuke-kun!"

She's a stupid girl, not innocent, not particularly competent. Too loud, too quiet. A forgettable presence; he doesn't owe her anything.

He also – cares for her. There is a bond there, and he's… alright with that, now he actually knows her.

She isn't – there are many things she is not, but that is less important than the fact she's a person he loves, in the bleak stunted painful way he has.

He isn't _Sasuke-kun_, but that's okay. For both of them. She throws her arms around his neck, and Sasuke-kun would have let her, gruffly, if he didn't manage to step away in time to avoid the contact. He wouldn't have held her back.

Changed in a fundamental way, he is aware, after Orochimaru, that touching is something one person does to another.

Absolutely fed up with being a victim, with letting things happen to him because fighting back will just make it worse, he holds her back. Her body pressed up against his, the vice-like grip around his neck that he doesn't want to break; the experience feels peculiar, estranged, but not bad per see. Uncomfortable, perhaps, but not desperately so. Her back under his hands, slender and solid, is a better sensation than he would have believed, and this is how it could've been, one of their many might-have-beens.

In a dream where reality doesn't open up where it's been torn, where red shadows don't reach for me through the gaps.

She cries into his shoulder, despite and because of the realization that though the color is right, the gaze in those eyes isn't.

Sasuke-kun, I didn't even dare miss you, and that might've been for the best; Sasuke-kun isn't coming back.

There's just Sasuke now. Maybe that's for the best as well. She loves him, after all, and you don't exchange your precious people, not for anything.

Used to being pushed away, she leaves her arms around his neck for as long as she can, hardly able to process that he hasn't shrugged away, hasn't even let go of her. There is a grip around her hips. Uchiha Sasuke's grip. Their broken darling's grip, and it isn't going to break.

Naruto stares at them with a watery smile below aching eyes, forcibly reminded of the first time Iruka-sensei slung an arm across his shoulders.

"Sasuke," Kakashi says eventually, a measured voice, a smudge surprised and something deeper.

Sensing something Naruto doesn't catch, Sakura-chan extracts herself from a passive, dismissive Sasuke, inches behind him until she's standing beside Naruto, a hand warm on his ribs. He chances a look at her in startled gratitude, slings an arm around her.

"Kakashi," Sasuke replies, in that tone that isn't his but with the voice that is. Scratchy, deep, makes you shiver, deep inside.

There is something so incredibly private, exclusive. Their looks at each other, the minimal tilt to Sasuke's mouth, Kakashi's hand on his shoulder.

With non-surprising but seldom-used courtesy Tsunade stays quiet until the moment has passed, until everyone is looking at her, expectant.

"I am here to confirm certain things," she says. "About Sound, and about Itachi."

"I see," Sasuke says, and moves, until they are all in the kitchen, cramped now, waiting for him. When he returns from the bedroom Itachi is held possessively, Sasuke hovering over the child with protective paranoia. Shit, Naruto is reminded. Holy shit, Sasuke has a child.

"He's fine," Sasuke says crisply.

"What experience do you base that judgment on?"

Rather to her surprise, Tsunade finds it is much easier to interact with Uchiha now, to deal with what he has become. It might be the eyes, or the surety of the dwarfish figure – a ninja, a boy, and dark-eyed. Things she can handle, all of them. He does not evoke pity, nor memories.

What she couldn't deal with properly, what ate at her, what called to her own lost ghosts, were the golden eyes, which are no more.

She had not thought she could grieve for that, but it appears some bonds go deeper than death.

Sasuke stares at her mutinously, with nothing to say.

"Shall I take a look?" Sakura asks. "Would that be satisfactory, for both of you?"

"Alright," Sasuke agrees. The silence before he spoke was so short, hardly long enough for doubt. But Orochimaru was always quick, and it does not do to forget that appearances mean little, in this world (tsunade knows that better than anyone).

"Yes," the Hokage agrees. "Do so."

So she takes Itachi from Sasuke, the quiet bundle resting easily against her chest, except she doesn't know how to do this, really, and she'd feel so much better if the kid would just have some kind of reaction. She brushes chakra over it, light, light fingers on soft skin, and the red eyes widen, fix on her, and this is creepier than it should be but she can't stop, won't stop, and amazingly there doesn't seem to be anything amiss.

"Healthy, I think," she says, subdued in uncertainty, trying to like the child (failing).

Even Itachi, Sasuke's brother Itachi who slaughtered the Uchiha Clan to see if he could, even he had normal eyes, once upon a time.

Sasuke accepts his son back, looks down at him with a befuddled and passionately soft expression Sakura ached to evoke from him, years ago. Still does, though not for the exact same reasons.

Love's love, and it doesn't leave you, change though it may.

"Sound, then," Tsunade says. "We've established the whereabouts of the two major gatherings of Orochimaru's former minions. Everything is set to go."

Sasuke looks up from Itachi, nods, businesslike, an improbable sight: killer extraordinaire, cuddling his baby. "Excellent." He offers the child a finger to play with. "This body hasn't fully adjusted to the chakra-increase it received due to the merging, but training it up to full potential should be fast work." Translation: I need a strong team, just in case. "Someone has to mind Itachi."

"We're already short on medics," Tsunade says, with a brief glance towards Sakura.

"I'm not…" Naruto pauses, hands moving restlessly at his sides. He offers a rueful, sheepish smile. "I'm not so good with babies, I don't think."

"I'll take him, then," Kakashi offers. "I don't mind."

"Alright," Sasuke says, with a slow look at him and a hint of what should have been a smile.

"Good," says Tsunade. "I'm sending Shikamaru and Neji with the two of you."

"If you must," Sasuke replies. Could've been much worse. "For clarification, then: I intend to re-establish myself as leader of the former Hidden Village of Sound, then bring them back to set up a base near Leaf Village, whose allies they are to understand themselves to be in the ongoing conflict."

"Acceptable," Tsunade says. She does not look happy. She looks powerful and burdened, a Hokage. Do what you have to do.

"Excellent," Sasuke says again, sounding like he means: barely adequate. "Did you set a time for departure?"

"Shikamaru has leave until tomorrow."

"Tomorrow, then," Sasuke affirms.

Tsunade nods, looks at him for a moment longer, this boy who is not, when all is said and done, a person she loved once (but not really, as i have told myself so many times).

She went here today to see him, see what she could glean and learn and leave behind, in a milieu that was not stylized, formalized as the Hokage office. Is still uncertain whether it was a good idea.

"I – made some promises," Sakura says. "Have to leave. But Sasuke, I'm so glad."

"Promises," he repeats, and whatever you want to call the expression on his face, it isn't a smile. "Yamanaka Ino?"

Her expression is worried, mildly annoyed. She steps away from Naruto, facing down Sasuke. "Is that any of your business?"

"Yes," he says. "Yes it is."

She offers a rueful twist of her lips. "Try," she asks. "For me?"

"I do," Sasuke replies, obviously not comfortable with the admittance. The rest is implied, sinks in after a moment's silence: I am trying, for you, I haven't killed her.

"It's… not the same," she says, and touches his face. He lets her get away with it the way a wary, half-tamed animal would. "You're both so important to me, in so different ways, but I can say truthfully that I lo–"

"Don't!" Sasuke sneers viciously.

Watching them, not allowing herself to see a roughish white head and a sleek black one, Tsunade translates his expression as best she knows how, aware it might not be very accurate.

_Don't say you love her, for if you do I shall despair, and my despair is not a pretty thing._

_Don't say you love me, because then I will break and I will hate you – don't say you love me, because I love you too, and it'll break the both of us, I'll break the both of us. _

Stupid silly kid, but at least he's trying. Hasn't hurt Ino, wants Sakura safe and reasonably happy. Better than Orochimaru, she supposes.

"Right," Sakura says. "I'll see you later, then." Marches off.

Tsunade does not respect others' privacy, but she does respect her own; follows her student out.

"Damn it," Sasuke says tightly, practically hurls Itachi at Kakashi – hands fisted and white at his sides.

"Honestly," Kakashi says with snide softness. Sadness underneath, always that, but not much of it. He knows what he's doing, always knows, and it could drive you mad if you let it. "Are you in a position to be so jealous?"

Sasuke nobly refrains from giving him a filthy look.

Kakashi shakes his head, assumes the tone of a teacher: the mock disgust, so familiar it is almost comforting. Still a mask?

"Go train, both of you. Fight it out. Learn to handle the chakra properly again. I'll take care of Itachi. Mind the collateral damage."

"Right," Naruto says, touches Sasuke's elbow.

"Are you really?" he asks, later, far from the village, beyond the normal training grounds where the forest still stands, untouched by the recent assault. "I mean, you could've had her if you wanted, before."

"I've lost enough people," Sasuke mutters murderously, low enough Naruto would not have heard him before Jiraiya started breaking the seal on Kyuubi.

The fight is bitterly brilliant.

They explode towards each other, again and again, and someone has to win but no one can lose, and this won't ever end, least not well.

And then it does.

The first time Naruto has sex with boy-version Sasuke is nothing like he imagined it would be. He's thought – or, he hasn't _thought_ about it (which in retrospect is kind of stupid) but the never-vocalized idea he's had is centered on violence, something fierce and abrupt and ardent, a fight taking a wrong turn. A back pressed into a rough surface, hard enough it has to be painful and neither of them could care less, holding up and holding fast, clinging blessedly strangling-tight, mouths wetly open, smeared with blood, sliding hotly against each other.

Something like that, like what certain memories and certain dreams and certain nightmares are made of. He grows hard, thinking about it, and disgusted. Feels unclean and aroused and animal and just – desperate, for too many reasons.

He also half expects a fist in his face, the one Sasuke didn't give him even though Naruto suspects he should have, over the last months.

Reality isn't anything like that. It's quiet, not the sort of silence that heralds or follows a major event but the kind of stillness that signifies a peak in and of itself.

"I fucking love you!" Naruto has screamed across all the ruined moments between them. "I hate you because I love you so goddamn much, you fucking asshole!"

Frustration and blood-loss have loosened his tongue: he is on his back, feeling demon power force his cells into hyper-activity, to replace the lost fluid.

He feels the wounds close up, seamless and searing, tells himself he's not scared because of the sudden confession. So maybe he didn't mean to say it, now or ever again. He never meant to kill more people than he's counted, either, or watch helplessly as others die, as his loved ones hurt.

Never meant to rely on the Kyuubi, or fightfuck Sasuke. Never actually planned on loving the bastard either, actually, though that last he doesn't mind so much.

A ninja has to get used to life taking unexpected turns – usually for the worse.

So he insists to himself they don't frighten him, the truth-words issued recently from chapped lips; unfortunately he has never been all that good at lying to himself.

"Dead-last," Sasuke husks, and the words sound like they're a strange taste in his mouth, alien between his tongue and palate. Naruto could laugh, almost, at that. He could almost laugh because hell if he's going to cry.

The ground bloody shakes, or if it's just Naruto trembling atop it, when Sasuke sinks to his knees beside him. It's probably just Naruto, realistically speaking – Sasuke's worn and willowy, not the kind of weight that makes the earth roll beneath it.

Regardless of what the ground does, Naruto shakes for him. He's up on his elbows, up on instinct. There are things worth fighting for. There are things worth losing for.

His hands close ache-hard around Sasuke's neck, holding him down over him. They're not any good at this, neither of them is – being close is dangerous, especially in the stillness with no distractions from the necessity. When you need someone so much you can't live without them, every moment carries an almost inhuman (_breaking_) weight.

The forest is a catastrophe around them, ashes and broken landscape. Naruto won't consider it symbolic.

It's so strange and disconcerting and wonderful, now and during the fight; the new-old proportions of Sasuke's body, the hard strength and frail-softer skin.

They're not the best they could have been.

Your level best can go a long way sometimes, though. Far enough?

"Hey," Naruto mumbles, voice shaking, fingers trembling, kisses Sasuke. Ironically, it's actually a mistake – he expected Sasuke to either slip free and sit back or force Naruto back down when he inched upwards, but had to move to avoid getting his spine crushed (to get closer, his sweaty face pressed to sasuke's).

Nevertheless, hold still, Sasuke did not move. Naruto's never exactly had a perfect understanding of him, and it usually frustrates him, but he thinks, dimly with Sasuke's lips on his, that maybe he can live with it this once.

Sasuke is beautiful lying in the dirt, and what's even more beautiful, and curious, and shit alarming too, come to think of it, but Naruto isn't thinking now, because moreover it's so goddamn inconceivably beautiful that Sasuke lets him.

Naruto has always figured Sasuke for the kind of guy who wouldn't appreciate being rolled around and pushed down and molested by his multitasking rival/best friend; experience has taught him in no uncertain terms that Sasuke is not generally the sort of guy who doesn't let his dislike of things shine through.

It's also let him know Sasuke does sometimes enjoy a bit of rough and tumble, and that he may occasionally (okay, pretty often) let you sleep with him even though he doesn't much want you to.

But right now Sasuke is not only not slugging Naruto senseless or sneering at him to take his perversions elsewhere; isn't glaring death or darkness or dishonor. He is on his back on ground as broken as is he with his shirt pooling around his armpits and Naruto leaning over him, and going by the hooded eyes and wet, parted lips he likes it.

His tongue is lost and found in Sasuke's mouth, his left hand in Sasuke's hair, its sibling stroking down his chest; Uchiha Sasuke is in his arms, panting like a fish on dry land, fingers wreaking havoc with Naruto's clothing, and fuck, am I crying?

Does he care?

No, didn't think so.

His hand travels further downward, past the hip, lingering for a moment at the fastening of Sasuke's pants before slipping cautiously underneath the material.

Sasuke gives him a sound, a breathy reluctant one, and a very long, very level gaze. What are you going to do, Uzumaki? Can you take it?

Naruto…takes the plunge.

This is beyond weird, and somehow his fingers are still expecting a female sex, but they aren't – aren't unwilling to discover new opportunities.

He looks down at Sasuke, still feeling unsteady, wobbly fox grin, and imagines the implicit question is clear: _how do we do this?_

In response to which Sasuke rubs impatiently against him, thighs parting to wrap around Naruto's hips. Not for the first time by far, but they've never previously had so much power behind them.

(they open like butterfly wings, like the gates of heaven, like a billion beautiful ethereal things that naruto is not actually the kind of man to readily think of, though sometimes he thinks he would've liked to be. at least aspiring towards the good and pure has to be worth something, right, even if you can't get there in actual reality?)

Like the legs of the one person Naruto loves without a single reservation and so much it scares him sick and without being able to hold back at all. They really are too bony, they really are pressing to hard around his waist, chafing against his hips, they really are absolutely perfect.

He stares down again into Sasuke's face and it could have been perfect, it should have been perfect, but he's meeting a mismatched gaze, Sharingan red and Sasuke dark, and the world is spinning.

He moves with it, on his back now, Sasuke straddling him, still mostly clothed and increasingly desperate.

Thinks he could cry again, afterwards, which is good in a way because while it furrows Sasuke's brow and makes him mutter about clumsy idiots, it proves he's still – he's not a horrible person, not completely someone he doesn't want to be.

"Idiot," Sasuke groans, easing his rather painful grip around Naruto's shoulder.

And Naruto finds, with an amount of cheeky, cheery non-caring that is spectacular even for him, that he really doesn't give a damn. Not about anything but this, not right now.

Sits back up at length, watching the proud, easy movement as Sasuke stands – not a claustrophobic prisoner inside his body anymore. The gesture when he brushes hair out of his face is achingly familiar, and clearly Sasuke shares this thought, and is growing tired of it, since he slips a left-over kunai from its sling around his thigh and cuts a generous portion off, leaving him with uneven bangs a good inch shorter.

"Heh," Naruto mutters, trying to angle his pants so the sodden spot at the front won't be quite so visible or annoying. "I could've done that better for you."

"I'm sure you enjoy telling yourself so," Sasuke replies. Unfairly, his pants are an inconspicuous black.

"Yup," Naruto says, firing off the brightest grin he can manage. "Some of us like telling it like it is."

Sasuke snorts at him, looking the other way.

A moment later he looks back though, and there's that peculiar hybrid between a grin and a smirk on his face.

"Say that with a blade in hand," he calls, bright as a summer morning, flickering between the remaining trees.

"Don't need a blade to take you!" Naruto calls back.

Sasuke is fast as hell, smooth and unpredictable; Naruto is shortly very grateful for his self-healing ability. After all, a main point of the fight is chakra training.

Fire and electricity have always been Sasuke's favorites, vicious and flashy they decimate the woodland and Naruto.

Shadow clones and taijutsu and Rasengan retaliate, only to discover that Sasuke has indeed acquired a rather extensive knowledge of new jutsu.

It's as close to perfect as you get in this world; giving your all, your absolute all, with the most desperately precious person.

Day is losing to dusk when they return to the village, shabby and sniping at each other. Inspecting his companion, Naruto is briefly glad they don't actually do their own laundry (what's the point of cloning techniques if you don't use them?).

"What?"

"Nothing," Naruto mumbles around a grin, arranging their arms around each other (oh god, like in country of the wave, like all those trainings and mission before the bad things happened), warm support.

Sasuke frees himself when they reach Kakashi's building, where the stairs are narrow, but given that he's already allowed it most of the way Naruto doesn't mind so much.

Inside Itachi starts whining the second Sasuke steps into the kitchen, where, until this unfortunate moment, the baby was dozing, leaving Kakashi to skim porn and cook dinner.

It does strike Naruto that there is probably something wrong with considering the scene homely, but never mind.

"Feeling better?" Kakashi asks over the edge of his book.

Ignoring the rhetorical question Sasuke steps past him and lifts the child, who calms with peculiar immediacy. Sasuke's expression is grave and uncomfortable as he adjusts his grip, dedicating a brief study to the baby, but Naruto could not have avoided noticing how fast he moved, the single-minded haste towards the child.

"Evening," he mutters to Kakashi, dusting off his jacket before stepping into the apartment proper.

"Shikamaru stopped by," Kakashi mentions with a demented smirk Naruto recognizes; one that makes him fear for his life. "We decided you should start off from the main gate three hours past dawn tomorrow."

"Man," Naruto sighs, dejected. "Cut me some slack here." It's decidedly doubtful whether it's worth running around to Neji and Shikamaru to argue about changing the time, though.

"I, on the other hand," Kakashi adds evilly, "was planning to take advantage of my baby-sitter duty and sleep out. Will Itachi be spending the night here?"

"No," Sasuke says. "I'm not – comfortable with that."

"No offense," Kakashi says, "but I haven't gotten much rest lately. I don't care if you stay over, but I'm taking the bed and I'd prefer not to be woken up in the morning."

"I'll go home," Naruto offers. The kitchen chairs do not look inviting, nor, really, is Kakashi's presence.

Sasuke stays pallid and silent, but there is something like surprise tinting his expression.

"Ah," Kakashi says. "Are you and Itachi staying, then?"

"I suppose we are."

"See you tomorrow," Naruto mumbles, stepping up and apparently startling Sasuke into allowing him to kiss his cheek. He does it playfully, gives it a nip. "Bye, Itachi, Kakashi."

The kid does not look at him, but swats at his hand when he lets it slip close enough to imitate touching.

xxxxxxxxxx


	37. The Sound of Silence

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 37:**

**"The Sound of Silence"**

"I – don't want to inconvenience you," Sasuke says, words clumsy and stiff. "I could leave. Can drop Itachi off here without waking you up tomorrow."

Kakashi does not turn from his cooking, glances briefly at the reflection offered by the dark window: Sasuke sitting curled up around Itachi, looking a little solemn and unaccustomedly uncomfortable.

"You could," he replies evenly.

Sasuke studies him for a brief moment before letting his gaze slide past him and fix on the strangely compelling reflection. They are both aware that they are both watching it.

The part of Sasuke that looks at his body from outside, the part that was Orochimaru and studies it with reverence as a wondrous object to own, is fascinated. When the snake Sannin first saw this body it was twelve years old, neither short nor particularly thin for its age, and its prettiness had not been worn down, hadn't acquired the quality of something precious and fading. The person he studies now (_himself_) does not look a mother but is very clearly adult, though too young for the discreet wrinkles around the eyes, dark now. Idly he muses that he is unlikely to grow larger; too old for it, really, and his brother too was small.

"Or you could stay," Kakashi continues neutrally. "It's entirely up to you."

"I see," Sasuke says, puts Itachi down and away. "I'm…"

His silence is one that struggles with words he cannot say, perhaps cannot even find.

"I know," Kakashi replies, inflectionless. "You're trying to let go."

"No," Sasuke protests, childish after all. And not childish at all, just so bone-deep tired, and so lost. This world isn't his, hasn't properly been his since the first Tsukiyomi hit him. "Yes. I suppose."

_I remember saying, _I love you too_, and not being certain why. But maybe – it could be –_

(maybe it wasn't a lie)

"You don't want to," Kakashi starts, turning the stove off.

"Of course I don't!" Sasuke interrupts. Is the man stupid? (am i?) "But that doesn't – that can't be allowed to matter."

"Why?"

He is hard pressed to think Sasuke would have looked more shocked or hurt or vengeful had he hit him, this grown-up child who tried to sever his bonds in The Valley at the End, for fundamentally different reasons. There's reason for that, needless to say.

"Because you." Sasuke stops himself viciously, forces the coming words. "I want something – more for you. Something better than what I can…"

Oh holy hell, what is he doing?

_Take everything that they have to offer, and then leave_.

Except he never managed that, not really, and I don't want to try anymore.

"You're," and Kakashi did not mean this to come out so condescending, did not mean for it to sound so sardonic, "trying to do the right thing?"

"I'm trying to – I don't know. Oh hell, just forget about it."

"Hm," Kakashi says, salting the stew. "What is it that you want?"

"I don't know." Sasuke looks wary, aggressive. He thinks about Itachi.

"From me?"

_I'm trying to do the right thing._

_How can you do the right thing if you don't know what it is?_

("_right is a point of view"_)

"I," Sasuke says, in a toneless, gravelly voice. "You are important to me. I – care for you. I want to be able to be – close to you." There is a pause, thoughts spinning visibly through his mind, struggling towards articulation, his voice hasty and thick. "I want to be important to you. I want to be sure you won't go away, that you'll never disappear from me."

I cannot believe I said that.

There is no time for regret.

Kakashi nods. "How is this different from what you want from Naruto?"

"It isn't," Sasuke says. "Only. I need it from him. If I am to want it from anyone."

Truth can make or break many things. Can be a gift, and can be treasured as such. Can be a curse as well.

I don't know what I intend this as.

He has gone through emotion and past it, stares out into the world with the knowledge he cannot continue screwing everyone up now he must make sure Itachi is cared for.

(_my way of the ninja!_ where no one is hurt, and the hero saves everyone, and anyone can have a happy ending)

(shut up, idiot)

"I see," says Kakashi, with a subtle kind of grin. "You don't make subtle distinctions, do you? You either care for people wildly or you don't at all, no subcategories."

"Those became pointless a long time ago," Sasuke says. He looks more like Orochimaru than he has for some time, but not – not directly unkind. "You are – what you are to me." I don't even have a word for it. "What do you want from me?"

A wise childish outburst, and the hateful implication; _it's yours if I can give it._

"I want the impossible," Kakashi says. He hasn't answered questions since he was young. There was never a point. "I want you. I want you to love me." He shrugs, not lightly. "I know I can't have that. I'm attempting to make peace with that knowledge."

"I see," Sasuke says very carefully. "How can I make that easiest for you?"

_How can I stop you trying to let go of me?_

_How can I stop myself stopping that?_

"I'm not sure," Kakashi says mildly. Truth is cash, tonight. "I've never tried it before."

"I don't want to enjoy hurting you," Sasuke says, and Kakashi thinks he is being honest. "But I do."

_It lets me know you are mine._

And this is why Anko will never be a threat, because he has cut her so deeply she will never belong to anyone else as completely as she has belonged to him.

Why he can keep himself from hurting Yamanaka Ino, because Ino has left no permanent scars on Sakura's heart.

"I'm aware of that," Kakashi says. "I'm tough. I heal."

"You'd better."

He lifts an eyebrow, trying for levity. "Agreed. Dinner?"

"I'm not pregnant anymore."

"You're still thin."

"Hn." A very Sasuke thing to say, but he doesn't feel like Sasuke. I'm not sure what I feel like.

He's never going to have easy muscles or broad strength; killer instinct is what matters, but agility and speed are assets to be honed and treasured. Slender equals practical.

"You can just watch me eat, then. I think Itachi would like some dinner, though."

"Oh. Right. Of course. Throw me a flask."

Kakashi does; puts the pot on the table, with a glass and utensils.

Eats economically, with the tasteless discipline of any trained fighter who's been through war and starvation before.

Sasuke is impatient with the child, fingers tugging mildly but still tugging at the little body. The sleep jutsu is administered after barely a burp.

"In a hurry?" Kakashi asks lazily.

"Hn." _Preoccupied._ He has said too much already, almost impossibly much.

"Want?" Kakashi asks, angling the pot minutely towards him.

Sasuke shrugs, takes the chopsticks from his hand and fishes up a bite.

"I'll do it," he mutters afterwards, grabbing pot and glass and starting the wash-up.

"If you like."

Kakashi bends wearily for Itachi, busies himself putting him to bed in the fake cradle. So many fake things.

Sasuke stops in the bedroom doorway, hair ruffled sleepily, like he's just woken up. "How?" he asks.

_Do you want me here?_

"It's up to you," Kakashi says carefully. Won't take responsibility for this one.

_Want you anywhere._

"Alright," says Sasuke, and steps inside.

Kakashi does not look at him, strips off his vest and pants, loosens the buttons of his shirt.

Light steps sneak up close behind him, Sasuke standing near enough he can feel the warmth, meager though it may be. He turns partially around, the back of his knees against the edge of the bed, looks down at Sasuke.

Black eyes in the dim light, stupefying long white legs under the shirt.

A dark eyebrow climbing his fronthead, almost smooth now, because there are limits to how much influence the remnants of Uchiha Sasuke has on this person, and he has offered enough vulnerability tonight. More than enough (never enough).

"Are you interested, now? I remember you prefer women."

"Don't be stupid," Kakashi mutters, and doesn't want to make a joke of it: knots his fingers in Sasuke's hair, cradles his head; lifts his face and kisses his mouth.

Sasuke lets him, for a long while, then slips past him to sit atop the bed.

Kakashi joins him there, silver hair falling soft as the kiss, obscuring his face as he crawls beneath the blanket and lies down.

"Coming?" he asks rather blandly

"In a manner of speaking," Sasuke mutters, then drops the mask. "If you want me to."

"I'm going to sleep," says Kakashi.

"Mmh," says Sasuke, and there is weight and unpleasant angles in the bed, pressing into Kakashi's side. Sasuke always sleeps on Kakashi's arm, letting Kakashi's wrist curve kindly, possessively, around the nape of his neck.

Sleep does not come easily to Sasuke tonight. Come morning he has barely rested, slips out of bed as carefully as he can. Having dressed himself and used the bathroom he returns, stands for what he meant to be just a moment over the bed, looking at the sleeping man.

He didn't say, I love you.

He doesn't want to lie, doesn't want to offer any more truth.

Leans forward to brush hair out of Kakashi's face, kiss his temple.

He vaguely remembers the legend about the Kiss of Death.

On the way out he pauses, also, at the cradle. In a sense this is easier, ironically: he bends, swift as sin, touches a fingertip to Itachi's cheek. Limp from the sleeping jutsu, the child does not move a muscle.

Sasuke is not used to having things to leave behind.

Neji is at the gate already, serene and immaculate. His hands look very pale against what seems to be burn wounds.

The Hyuuga nods gravely, the minimal inclination of his head demanded by the heroic history of his lineage, of his upbringing.

Memories of child-Sasuke scream at him to return the greeting properly, not to be outdone in polite rituals, while the remnants of Orochimaru shrug, and chuckle. Politeness is good for unsettling the uncouth, but civilized people trapped in its rituals will oft be more shaken by simple rudeness.

"Are you certain this is a good idea?" Neji asks. His voice is carefully inflectionless.

"Yes," Sasuke says shortly.

Neji does want to be satisfied with that, does want to let it rest.

On the other hand Neji wants for a lot of things which are not granted him.

"I heard," he says, still calm, in the rich trained voice of a man who speaks seldom and with weight behind his words, "that you very recently screamed for a good thirty hours."

He expected malice. Did not anticipate the expression of – startled recognition.

Belatedly he remembers that though they were never Sasuke's forte, implication and insult came easily to Orochimaru.

"Worried about your wife?" Sasuke inquires, and the tone might actually have been politely concerned if not for the subtle lift of his eyebrow.

"Hey!" a familiar voice calls through the chilly morning mist, accompanying the swift running steps. "Sasuke! Neji."

Naruto, beaming brilliant Naruto who makes sunlight unnecessary with his garish glow. Coming to stand just beside Uchiha, nodding across the few feet's distance to Neji.

It freezes him that Uchiha simply does not need to actually touch Naruto. Neji is not even competition. I knew that, didn't I? Yes.

"Morning, guys," Naruto blabbers on around a yawn, obviously in nervously high spirits, going on like he hasn't for months. "Where's Shikamaru? Lazy thing late again?"

Evidently he is, but not by much, at least not as measured by the standard Kakashi set.

They set off at a brisk pace, running close enough for easy communication, in these safely familiar forests.

"Alright," Shikamaru says. "As fast as we've reached Sound it's a different matter since I'm not the one with specific expertise, but until then – well, I like myself alive and uninjured. I'd say I'm the best planner."

"Agreed," Neji says evenly, not looking at anyone.

_Worried about your wife?_

I probably should be.

"Yeah," Naruto agrees with the proposition.

"Alright," Uchiha mutters.

"Good," says Shikamaru, and proceeds to go into Chuunin mode and deal out instructions. "Neji in the front, start the Byakugan scanning as fast as we're past the border. Uchiha, follow him. Naruto, you take the rear."

They assume position swiftly and wordlessly. Shikamaru can't help thinking about the team he headed almost four years ago, hunting for Uchiha, nor that one time he worked with the ANBU – that same impression of orderly lethality.

Except it might be quite more than an impression, this time.

There is little need or want for interaction. Naruto wonders briefly, around a miniscule fire at night, whether Shikamaru will whisper to Sasuke about what he said to Naruto, last they worked together, but nothing happens. Naruto slumps down close to Sasuke, chewing energetically, watches Neji sitting stark and alone on the far side of the flames and Shikamaru dozing with his back against a tree.

Two days later Neji says, "There are people around us. Some of them may be aware of our approach. It seems reasonable to assume they are scouts from the main Sound party hidden beyond the cliffs up ahead."

"Right, then," Sasuke says. "Headbands off."

Naruto obeys reluctantly, putting the precious item away in a pocket, waiting until Neji and Shikamaru have done the same. Sasuke, of course, has not worn a headband for anything but deception, mission necessity, for the last – almost four years, now. God.

"Look impressive," Sasuke says. "Feel free to maim, but don't kill yet."

We need someone to herald our advent.

Hence when they walk into the camp they do it with style and audience both, Sasuke appearing pathetically short flanked by Neji and Shikamaru; as the one with superhuman healing ability, Naruto inevitably ended up in the vulnerable spot shielding their backs.

They are faced primarily by an assembly of perhaps ten fighters standing proud and clearly waiting for them in the middle of the camp. Probably a hundred pairs of eyes follow their steps as they draw closer. Naruto does not need to be able to see more than Sasuke's neck to be certain his eyes are red, with the complicated blood-bought details of the Mangekyou.

He has hardly talked, since they left. It hasn't been a bad silence, per see, just a thoughtful one.

Sound is shabby, there is no denying it, but Naruto has seen starved and hurried campsites before, and the multitude of weaponry he glimpses is in excellent condition. The ninja have hard exteriors, unwashed and curt. Strong, undeniably that.

Of course, appearances are prone to be deceiving, but he does not think these are.

A man steps forward from the group of strangers. Naruto scans him hurriedly: pretty tall, pallid the way that means he has minions who do his dirty daylight work for him, that he mostly only fights in the dark, a notable amount of chakra, and probably he's shielding.

"Uchiha Sasuke," he says slowly, in a deep carrying voice. Partly question, partly acknowledgement.

"I've been known to answer to the name," Sasuke says. He sounds as cold as he looks, like his touch would leave frost-bite on your skin. "I'm sure you remember that this body is called that, Domei."

The man apparently named Domei transforms a startle into a raised eyebrow. Question still, challenge as well now: "Orochimaru-sama?"

"I've been known to answer to that name too," says Sasuke. "It is no longer a distinction of any importance."

"Those are," a woman says, stepping forward to stand just behind Domei. "That's the final form of the Sharingan. You have achieved the Mangekyou, Orochimaru-sama."

There is a ripple of noise around them, people breaking out in whispers, rumor and speculation traveling across the camp with the speed of, befittingly, sound.

"Correct," Sasuke says, still cold, superior, but letting a faint note of pleasantry enter his tone. Orochimaru, Naruto remembers vaguely, was a lengthy talker, knew how to convince an auditorium. "I slew Uchiha Itachi for them."

"If," Domei starts, has to repeat himself over the tide of shocked noise. "If you are truly our master, then fight me, and prove it, and I shall gladly kneel for you, as ever I have done!"

"Adequately put," Sasuke says, and his expression chills Neji to the bone (the idea a monstrosity like this should be presumed to be on our side!). "Very well." He waves the Leaf ninja away. "Stand aside."

Naruto does so rather hurriedly, eager to see what Sound's apparent leader is good for. Beside him Shikamaru follows at a slightly more sedate pace, muttering under his breath about how this is not only troublesome but ridiculous as well. He's never been one for pretentious epics.

Neji, who sees more than either of them, more than any other living person within miles and miles, speaks not.

Sees the tension coiling through Uchiha, the anticipation and power. The rush of fear and anxiety and need in Domei.

Neji might not be a genius in the way Shikamaru is, but he knows how this will end. Hopes Uchiha can keep his deranged mind together long enough not to fuck this up entirely until they have achieved slightly better odds.

The Sound villagers step back as well, clearing a, under the circumstances, generous space for the two combatants.

Ostensibly and with showmanship he ought not to possess, Uchiha pauses to liberate his weapons, and, astonishingly, to drop them uselessly on the ground. Kunai, shuriken and exploding tags land in a neat circle around him, and he looks up, with a smirk of pleasure so twisted it becomes something entirely different.

His opponent is not a fool, keeps his head and his arsenal.

It quickly becomes apparent that the substitute leader of the remnants of the Hidden Village of Sound is skilled, as well. Clearly Jounin level; clearly, as he evades certain moves, quite above the minimum requirements for that.

So's Sasuke, though, and so was Orochimaru, for a very long time.

Shikamaru is tempted to doze, can only regret that the hostile stares make napping uncomfortable. Neji must reluctantly admit that Uchiha is a beautiful fighter, that in a parallel dimension Naruto's wide-eyed staring, his drinking in the sight with minimally parted lips, might not have been entirely outrageous.

Sasuke tilts his head to the side, studying Domei even as he absently dodges several attacks. To a considerable extent this is for show, he reminds himself. He should play up, should let loose with some impressive techniques and wear Domei down slowly before dealing out a decisive finishing blow. Let them have a hint of what I'm capable of.

It just seems so meaningless, and the desire to fight, honestly and deadly, is itching inside him, clawing its way out through raw, over-sensitized skin.

He sidesteps another assault, contemplates. Chidori and fire jutsu are perfect for showing off, but in order to establish his identity as Orochimaru he ought probably to employ moves more typical of the Sannin – sound techniques, snake summoning, something dark and twisted.

He settles for a compromise, blowing sound-waves and fire Domei's way before jumping, spinning, feet connecting hard with Domei's neck. Domei stumbles, struggles down onto his knees.

Sasuke lands elegantly, pure style. Waste of time to pose like this in any real battle, but you do what you need to, and it looks the way it's supposed to: masterful, effortless.

_Sakki_ crawls up his spine, and he models it, forces it structured, lets it leak from a single fingertip pointed at Domei's fronthead.

The man freezes, stops. Manages to bow his head, blood dripping from his ears.

Sasuke lets everything hang in the balance for a few moments, hoping for another assault (_give me an excuse_) but eventually he must chain down the _sakki_, stand up straight.

"Master," Domei says, bowing formally as best as he's able with the burn wounds lining his side. "I acknowledge you as Orochimaru-sama, leader of the Hidden Village of Sound and all its ninja."

Sasuke nods gravely. "Let us proceed. There are certain issues which merit discussion. You may rise, Domei."

"Yes, Orochimaru-sama. This way, if you please?"

Sasuke inclines his head again, gestures over his shoulder for the Leaf shinobi to follow. So too does the Sound group that waited for them with Domei.

Minutes later they are all assembled in a tent, seated around a scratched but clearly expensive table. The Sound ninja's expressions vary between uncertainty and wild joy. Sasuke knows them all, picked several up himself when his body was still tall and called Orochimaru. They are worthwhile, if not all outstanding.

"Master," Ami says. "If I may be so bold – where have you been?"

"I had some business to attend to in Leaf," Sasuke says.

"Speaking of which," a terrifyingly scarred man interjects into the following silence, "who are those people? They from Leaf?"

"As a matter of fact, they are," Sasuke confirms calmly, condescendingly. "The blond one is the Kyuubi host."

Astonishingly, the stares and whispers are not hateful, much less scornful. On the contrary, Naruto understands slowly, doubting his own judgment, there's admiration there, respect. Fear, certainly, but of the wary, envious kind, not of the sick murderous variety offered by people who have actually lived through the horror of the Fox Demon of the Nine Tails. This is the reaction of people who care only for the moral of strength, and need.

"And a Hyuuga," Ami comments at length, glancing at Neji before shifting her gaze to Shikamaru. "What does that make you?"

"Nara Shikamaru, Leaf Chuunin." He sighs, contemplates. Scratches his neck. "I took down one of the Sound Four who picked up Uchiha years ago."

"Huh," she says. "They were always too arrogant, those four."

Neji fists his hands below the table and stares evenly at Uchiha. Watches words form in his throat before they spill softly, slowly into the air, sweet as a promise. Inevitable as that, too.

Uchiha Sasuke was mainly wont to grunt and give curt orders. Neji would have liked that better than this masterful display of an orator's skill, a dictator's indulgence and sharp assertions of authority. There are words of Leaf being depleted but its core being untouched yet and strong – a useful tool for keeping things in motion, as it were.

War, according to Orochimaru, according to Sound, according, one is presumed to believe, to what has become of Sasuke, is a fortunate state of affairs. It is to be prolonged, their win postponed until long grievous battles have been fought, heroes and their victims found and lost.

The course of action, in other words, is to be an alliance with Leaf.

One brave soul inquires into the wisdom of this. Uchiha raises one eyebrow in the dismissive, disdainful gesture that means: you have not fought me for the privilege of addressing me, worm. The man's own comrades hiss him silent and subdued, and Neji gets the definite impression he will be in for a healthy beating later.

He can imagine all too vividly what punishments Orochimaru dealt out for speaking up out of turn.

Uchiha does not need to say: I created you. This village exists by my whim, my name and my power hold it together, hold you up. None of you are anything without me.

"I'd like to fight you," Ami remarks to Naruto the moment the gathering is dismissed. "If Orochimaru-sama permits, of course?"

"Feel free," her master says, looking rather self-satisfied and challenging.

Neji knows whom Naruto would like to fight, and against whom Uchiha too would want to measure himself. Knows it won't matter, here and now.

"You're on," Naruto tells the girl with a grin.

She is not the only one he fights that night. Nor is she the only one paying attention to him, offering respect – whether fake or genuine he doesn't know.

Shrugging, Neji decides he might feel better for blowing off some steam and accepts a few challenges himself.

He pointedly does not watch as Uchiha and Naruto slip away, leaving him and Shikamaru to share a recently evacuated tent. In Leaf the weakest ones would not have been kicked from their beds to leave room for high-ranked guests, but this is not Leaf, and Neji cannot summon the energy to honestly mind.

In the main pavilion Sasuke gestures the remaining attendants out, watches Naruto grin warily.

"I think that went rather well," the blond announces. "They're all over you, Neji and I kicked ass, and as long as we can do that they're just gonna follow us, aren't they, and believe me, kicking ass will never be a problem!"

"Indeed," Sasuke says, not sparing the babble much attention. He needs to consider how the administration will have to be set up, what arrangements and compromises will need to be enforced.

He should not think about Itachi.

"So," Naruto says. "What's the plan for tomorrow, oh great leader?"

"Isn't it obvious? We will turn towards Leaf, intercepting the smaller gathering of Sound ninja on the way. I anticipate little trouble."

"Sounds good," Naruto agrees. He's standing close now, bright and with a hint of sweat from his matches. "Is everything – as it should?"

"'Should' is a useless concept," Sasuke dismisses. His body's forced and hasty adjustment to the increased chakra levels worked, but not smoothly. A migraine is brewing in his skull, power itching underneath his skin, eager to break free.

"You're such a pessimist, Sasuke." It is not an entirely playful utterance, spoken close to his face.

"Realist," he corrects. Looks up at Naruto from under rather heavy lids; remembers too late that his eyes are not golden.

"I want to," Naruto breathes, hot moist air against his jaw. "Do you?"

"This isn't the time," Sasuke replies. "Sleep on the couch."

It's startled relief that Naruto does not argue – Sasuke's headache is growing worse, and it'd be just as unseemly for the leader of Sound to argue with a mere demon container as to share a bed with him in these circumstances, with so many eyes undoubtedly watching them.

Sasuke, of course, is not aware that recent events (on kakashi's bed, in the forest afterwards) alerted Naruto quite alarmingly to how wrong those other times really were, when Sasuke said neither yes nor no and simply let him.

(how did he do it with itachi?)

(bad thought, bad thought, but naruto cannot stop picturing it, sweating and twisting in his sheets)

(i'll just have to make sure i'm the lasting impression, then)

xxxxxxxxxx


	38. Almost Enough

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 38:**

"**Almost Enough"**

Naruto wakes the next morning with Sasuke's hand on his shoulder, a light, cold touch. Ice, melting.

"Let's go," Sasuke says, dropping a bread roll on his face.

"Agreed," Naruto mutters, swinging his legs over the edge of the couch and making short work of the offered breakfast.

"Orochimaru-sama?" a timid voice asks, heralding a redheaded youth stepping into the pavilion. "The preparations are mostly finished."

"Good," Sasuke replies. "I'll be back outside shortly."

When the stranger has bowed and left Naruto chances a questioning glance at Sasuke, who explains it is almost noon.

Stepping out into the bleak sunlight, Naruto discovers that, startlingly, this appears indeed to be the case. Most of the Sound camp has packed up, and he spots Neji and Shikamaru in a group of foreign ninja, the Hyuuga apparently dealing out instructions.

Funny that Neji and Sound took so well to each other. On the other hand Naruto supposes they have nothing personal against each other, mainly because Neji simply does not do personal, and their cold views on usefulness, hierarchy and abstracted morality should be rather compatible.

Shikamaru looks bored and disgusted, but then Shikamaru always looks bored and disgusted.

Naruto directs his attention back to Sasuke just in time to see one of the men from yesterday's mini-council rush up behind him, leaking lethal intent all over the last sprinted meter. Just in time to see Sasuke's hand snap out behind him, crush its way straight into the attacker's torso.

The entire campsite seems still, quiet, watching suspended and with baited breath as Sasuke pauses for a moment before jerking his hand sharply, ripping the beating heart out of the other ninja. Who stands upright for a second more, eyes glazed, before falling in a bleeding heap at Sasuke's feet.

Sasuke drops the still pulsing heart on the ground like so much garbage, continues on his way as though nothing out of the ordinary has occurred. Perhaps it hasn't.

They travel for some time, swallow the other group of Sound ninja, return to Leaf.

"I'll stay with them," Neji offers.

Sasuke nods. "You too, Naruto," he stipulates, moving swiftly after that towards the Hokage Tower, a disgruntled Shikamaru in tow.

For obvious reasons they are let in at once; people want to live, the guards being no exception, and this desire compels them not to disagree with ninja who have red eyes, even if the Hokage has not given orders to the effect these red-eyed ones are to be granted immediate passage. Which, in this case, she has.

"They're here," Sasuke says, looks at his old teammate and thinks she isn't at all as much like Sakura as people tend to assume. Not at all.

"And how are they?" she inquires, fighting a headache, fighting the impulse to reach for her sake.

"Hard," Sasuke says. "Scared. Obedient. Useful."

"That is…" she stops herself, searching for words, not finding the ones she wants. "Good."

Necessary arrangements are set up in short order. Sound, understood as a separate entity and busy at work construction a modest village of their own, growing like a cancer at the eastern part of the Leaf Village wall, is to be governed by their Orochimaru-sama and a council of seven delegates.

Councilor status is won through trial by fire, simple matches, though not to the death. That would be too wasteful, with war upon them.

It is quickly stipulated that at least four of the council seats must be reserved for Sound ninja, but the remaining three are open for anyone who can fight and win. On Tsunade's insistence and with Sasuke's amused agreement, Morino Ibiki claims one of these seats for himself. Surprisingly well tolerated for a Leaf citizen, Neji takes another (my wife will be horrified).

In return the Leaf Council of Elders must admit a Sound ninja amongst them (tsunade snorts; the elders' only authority is to choose the next hokage in case the previous leader had not decided on an heir). Probably they would not have gotten away with so little, probably they would have had to sacrifice more in order to annex Sound, had it not been apparent Sasuke has sway with Tsunade (of a fashion), that Leaf's strength is more solid, and had Leaf hands not helped build the newfound Sound home.

After some negotiation, consensus is reached that concerning crimes involving both Leaf and Sound citizens, the perpetrators are to be judged and sentenced according to the laws of the victim's village. This does lead to some rather tragic-comic interludes before the system is assimilated into the general consciousness.

If you steal in Sound and are found out, no one will expect else but for the victimized individual to reclaim their property and beat the thief senseless.

It is not wise for mischievous Leaf children to nick anything from Sound.

On the other hand, the man from Leaf who slew a drunk Sound ninja is not punished, because if you cannot even protect your own life in times of peace, what good will you be on missions, and what does Sound exist for if not war?

The conflict seems to have paused, though. At least, it refrains from escalating. For the now.

xxxxx

It is almost a day before Sasuke can fetch Itachi. He glimpsed the child earlier, a bundle in Kakashi's arms; a distinctive shook of silvery hair in the crowd.

Now it is evening and he is scaling the familiar stairs, Naruto on his heels.

Itachi is awake when Kakashi eventually unlocks the door, a shouting package rocked easily by the grimacing Jounin.

Who has found, surprisingly, that he isn't so comfortable with the sleeping jutsu and who has, consequently, spent many nights hushing and soothing.

…_means I love the kid too, in a way._ So he has said, and apparently he means it. Discovered this rather startling fact quite recently. Has decided to stop lying so much to himself, so doesn't bother denying it.

(not lying isn't the same as telling the truth)

The less you have, the more precious it becomes?

No, that was never how it was, not for him.

Furthermore Itachi isn't his, and perhaps Kakashi does not even want him to be. This is something – he fumbles for the concept, shaking his head almost at the irony – something selfless.

The kid stops bawling, finally, and Kakashi eases his grip. Something tugs at his heartstrings, leathery and unbendy though they may be, as Itachi proves he has learned to smile. Slowly, seriously, as those few other times, he inches the corners of his mouth upward, staring straight and solemn into Kakashi's face.

Kakashi knows not to pay too much attention to this (that way danger lies) and does not hesitate to hand the baby over to its parent.

Sasuke accepts it rather uncomfortably, looks down into the little face, and his expression is – just strange. No other words for it, just weirdness.

"Poor kid," Naruto mutters, teasing, anguished, inspecting the boy over Sasuke's shoulder. "You're going to make for _such_ a lousy mother."

"I am not," Sasuke retorts reflexively, not shifting his focus from the child.

"Yeah right, bastard," Naruto dismisses. "Hey, Kakashi, you smell strange."

Kakashi lifts an eyebrow; Sasuke belatedly looks up, tilts his head contemplatively and breathes in deeply through his nose. They are all aware Kyuubi enhances Naruto's senses, but not to what exact extent.

"Anko," Sasuke establishes, stepping back a pace and hushing absently at Itachi. "Did you sleep with her?"

"Yes, actually," Kakashi says. "Do you mind?"

"I believe not," Sasuke says thoughtfully. "Thanks for looking after him."

Kakashi just nods, a swift movement Sasuke mirrors. He walks home with Itachi on one arm, Naruto beside him carrying a bag stuffed with milk and diapers.

"So," Naruto mumbles, dumping his load in the kitchen and following Sasuke into the bedroom. "Where do we put the kid? Also, aren't babies supposed to be pretty damn noisy?"

"That's what sleeping jutsu are for, imbecile," Sasuke retorts.

"Right," Naruto replies, rather dubious about the moral of this reasoning but unfairly tempted by the prospect of uninterrupted sleep.

Quite soon the baby has been fed and tucked in in a makeshift cradle, a sweater for his blanket. While certainly not the kind of luxury heirloom cradle Sasuke slumbered in during infancy, it definitely looks a good deal cozier than the sterile social service ones Naruto had to endure. Not kid should ever have to suffer through those, the white metal creaking that no one cares for you, no one at all.

Then they are alone in the shady silence, he and Sasuke, whom he is so intimately familiar with and who has undergone so many drastic recent changes. Does that matter?

Giving birth, if not assuming dictatorship over a pseudo-village, has got to have some impact on you, right?

Sasuke looks a question at him, and yes, this time Naruto knows the answer.

"I," he says. "When I saw you in Sound. You were brilliant. So fucking wrong. And I wanted. So much."

(_to fix_)

Sasuke snorts at him, but it's an absent noise. More immediate, more focused, is the line of tension, the certain expression, so keenly recognized even on minutely different features.

He's tense and overloaded, chakra pushing for an outlet, muscles straining to be used.

He'd forgotten quite what if feels like, to be intimate with someone while wearing a male body. So much the same, so very different. Naruto is a quick study, for once.

"Heh," Sasuke mutters a long time later, shifting ineffectively; panting still, sweat-slick. He could push away; isn't chained anymore by the exhaustion and ache that means you're helpless and you can't get up and you will lose.

Rolling over, he looks down at Naruto's flushed, whiskered face. It remains relaxed for just a second before the tensions snaps back.

Naruto hears it clearly though Sasuke does not speak: _Maybe I should do you sometime for a change, huh?_

Naruto hasn't ever much thought about that. Sex was exclusively about girls for years, at least consciously, and the concept seems strange. Being inside Sasuke, in whatever incarnation, is _brilliant_, but he's… He hasn't always been sure Sasuke likes it.

On the one hand that makes for a very good incentive to try it out himself.

On the other there are suspicions he does not want confirmed, and his not being unused to it doesn't mean he likes pain, and he doesn't want it associated with their bedroom any more than it already is (than it has to be, we being who we are?).

"Yeah?" he mumbles, words slurred around his short breath. Willing but uncertain, reluctantly but desperately uncomfortable.

Until Sasuke gives him a lazy, knowing smirk and adds, like it's a normal thing to say and not blatant bait, not the best and worst turn-on ever, "You know, Sasuke's never done that."

Talking about himself in the third person was a habit he outgrew early, like all marks of childhood, but saying, _I've never_, would be a lie. Orochimaru's memories might not be the ones linked most firmly to this body, but they are mine all the same.

Abrupt as lightning Naruto drags Sasuke completely atop him, eyes dark and positively glazed with possessive desire, thighs falling open.

Sasuke opens his mouth to snicker but is intercepted by a demanding tongue.

xxxxx

Jiraiya sighs. Not unusually, Tsunade has a point. Also not unusually, that's largely bad news.

Honestly, though, he probably should corner Naruto, find out how the kid's doing, make sure everything's alright. Keep his mouth shut, or at the very least minutely censored, about Uchiha.

Getting some more info on Sound and Itachi wouldn't hurt either, and regardless of personal feelings Kyuubi must be monitored.

All of which means he bitches about it a fair bit but eventually directs his steps towards the accursed Compound – they should have burned all of it down years ago, a decent burial for all the lost souls and a firm order to those same ghosts to stay dead.

He walks fast and scowling through the sub-village, the endless rows of dead homes, looking for the single inhabited house. Heh, it's just a matter of time before the buildings start decaying – if they can't be torched, at least they could be put to use. God knows the administration is in dire need of more space.

Eventually he finds the right dwelling (there's a limit to how long his pride will allow him to stall), and, sighing again, scratching at his head, he adjusts his chakra cloaking and steps forward to knock.

Naruto opens on the fifth rap, looking sleepy and happy with some kind of worn bathrobe over his pants.

His face closes, goes anxious, when he registers who's come. "Jiraiya? What's happened?"

"Nothing, brat. Stopped by for a chat, is all."

"Okay?" Naruto says, a little warily. "Are we, um. Let me grab some more clothes first, alright?"

"Just step aside," Jiraiya tells him gruffly. "I came to talk, I said. We might as well do it here."

"I suppose," Naruto says doubtfully, lets him in. "Shield your chakra and keep your voice down, okay?"

The reason behind the request becomes obvious in a moment, when Naruto hurries to close a door, mercifully obscuring Jiraiya's brief view of a messy bed, a black head buried among its pillows.

"They're both sleeping?" he asks, relieved and disappointed that the child's kept so conveniently away.

"Yup," Naruto affirms. "Let's keep it that way. I mean, good luck trying to talk over the shouts of, 'Get the fuck off of my property!'"

Remembering basic manners (remembering old days with a big kind hand ruffling his hair and a booming voice telling him how to be helped along) Naruto offers him a seat and breakfast.

"Alright," he says eventually, when they are both seated. "You wanted to talk…?"

"Yeah," Jiraiya said. "I know we have – are of different persuasions, regarding important matters. I set out to ascertain everything worked out."

"It does," Naruto says.

"I see," Jiraiya replies, striving for non-committal.

Naruto said, _Anything you do to Sasuke's child, I will do to you._

("i am," naruto says, and doesn't let go. "sasuke and i are what we are, to each other. i'm not letting you do anything to a helpless kid, and don't even think about touching his. do I make myself clear?")

And Naruto can't take it back, can't say he's sorry, even though he is, because he did not mean to stand with a punishing hand around a loved mentor's throat.

And Jiraiya can't exactly take his words back, nor say he's sorry, even though he is, because he never meant to have to threaten a child.

"Right," he says at length. "Look after yourself, kid."

"I will," Naruto says. "Thanks. For everything."

Jiraiya nods hastily, averts his face as he leaves with a (last, significant) clasp of his hand around Naruto's shoulder.

Whatever else you say about Uchiha, and Jiraiya says a lot (traitor, whore, murderer, slut, criminal) he apparently keeps Kyuubi in check. Jiraiya isn't needed for anything here (was needed, with another dark-haired prodigy, when he was young and couldn't measure up, and yes, he supposes he does know the exact moment when everything went wrong and fell apart, slipped from his eternally grasping hands).

He says, because he is old now, and realizes with a kind of blunt horror that borders on resignation and disgust both that he has nothing to leave behind, "He isn't really Sasuke anymore, you know."

"Yes he is. Orochimaru, too, but – but he'll always be Sasuke."

"That's – strange," Jiraiya admits. "The way you can think that. The way he is that. The merging jutsu finished, didn't it? Should he be them both, in equal measure? Or even more Orochimaru?"

He's always found it funny he doesn't have any trouble speaking the name. Feels the burn of it, though. Always.

And he is helpless against the bitterness, against how _cheated _he feels, because if anyone should be coming back… it's not fair that it was just Uchiha. Not when it could have been Jiraiya's precious person too, and holy shit, if he hadn't long since drunk himself into immunity against humiliation it would scorch him now.

"I believe," Naruto says, slowly, kindly. Impossible to refuse or refute. "That that's because, probably, he was welcome as Sasuke."

(_he wasn't as orochimaru?_)

"Huh," Jiraiya says. Last word, significant, without looking, because he lost too much too long ago, and perhaps it's just as well that he won't leave anything behind (knows the pain of _being_ left behind).

Naruto looks after him for a long time before returning to his tea and his bed and his family.

xxxxx

Anko steps slowly onto the street, shading her eyes from the glaring sun – it's stupefying warm for late fall.

Her skin itches, sweat lining the fishnet of her shirt, sticking to her skull. The seal is a weak pounding, a more fevered pulse beating against the skin at the base of her neck.

She's feeling pretty good, all the same.

Hums a tone absently as she walks towards the bread shop, returning the occasional wave and nod from subordinates and colleagues. There wasn't anything at home to eat this morning; she's been meaning to restock but hasn't gotten around to it for a while.

Inside the administration building, chewing devoutly on her bread roll, she finds Morino Ibiki and essays a greeting.

He gives her the kind of amused, disgusted look practiced by everyone who's ever had younger family members that have not yet learned not to talk with their mouths full.

It cheers her, in the little ways that might matter after all.

"Everything going good?" she asks after she's swallowed. "Any new missions looking interesting?"

"Nothing much yet," he replies. A fatherly kind of tone, strangely and familiarly. "I was thinking of establishing myself as one of the Sound Councilors."

"Yeah? What'll Uchiha say about that?"

Ibiki shrugs. "His opinions are of very little interest to me. I believe we will be able to work together as professionals."

"Huh," she says, feels the seal itch acutely.

"Let us hope so, at least," Ibiki replies, with a rough, straining sort of kindness to his dry tone. Nods awkwardly, continuing towards whatever meeting or mission he is to handle. Leaves her to recline lazily on the nearby couch, stretching out with a practiced kind of magic to cover it entirely despite having a body that really should not be large enough to accomplish this. She throws a leg over the sofa's back, lights a smoke.

It's a bad habit, but what do you do? She needs something to occupy her hands.

There are several rather pressing issues she would rather not devote her thoughts to. A self-proclaimed Hidden Village of Sound established so very close, only a wall away from Leaf. Will I visit it? Walk the streets, fight and laugh with the people who created his dream?

(embodied and died for a vision she was cast away from)

All under the leadership of Uchiha Sasuke, whom she still thinks of as Orochimaru-sama, even as she curses herself for it. That's getting old.

Iruka slips into the staff room after a while, nodding surprised greeting. With sarcastic amusement she notes his gaze traveling up her mostly exposed thigh and the dull blush cresting his cheeks as a result of this unauthorized visual exploration.

Snorting, she reaches for the pack of cigs previously thrown onto the table; discovers her arm is too short for the endeavor and swings her legs back towards the floor, sits up properly so she can get at the precious sticks.

Entering, Kakashi looks up from his book just long enough to follow Iruka's gaze up her leg before she is decent again. He says, "Morning", and she is surprised the sound does not grate on her ears.

"Good morning," Iruka smiles, and Anko offers an indolent wave, liberating a cigarette.

She remembers Kakashi's hands, still a little tanned and not as steady as they were once but compensating for it adequately, capable around the child she glanced at from only a little bit of distance. Creepy dwarf, but not her problem.

Remembers those same hands on her waist, and other places. She knew it was stupid to sleep with him, knew it when she did it, because she's never been able to look a person in the face without disgust after sharing their bed (they're not orochimaru, they're not) but finds to her surprise she is not averse to Kakashi's presence.

They did what they did, and he was fine at it and she is fine with it. Might do it again, should she stumble upon him at the right time and place.

How strange.

A person she does not mind working missions with, or having lunch with, or sleeping with.

She represses a tactile flashback of staring with adoration at Orochimaru, knowing she existed through his will alone, even when things turned bad. The honor of being selected, the comfort of being his, exclusively his.

How, afterwards, people couldn't reach through the spiky self-sufficiency.

How I didn't want them to. Except now maybe I don't mind so very much, if the contact's brief.

xxxxx

Kankurou is sweating like a horse in labor, panting like a bitch in heat, thick hair and makeup that's running after all sticking to his face in pudgy flakes. He leans his cheek against the wall of the cave, hoping for dampness that isn't blood or sweat or urine. The sun is utterly merciless above them, and he cannot allow himself a single whisper of chakra to divert the heat.

He turns his head, looks at the figure hidden but waiting like destiny further inside the cave.

It was a shit choice, but Gaara killed Jounin before he'd outgrown diapers, and a kin-slayer Kankurou does not want to become, so when it turned out the opposing leaders weren't hunky-dory either but just as cold and murderous as Gaara's ever been – well, crappy choices have to be made too.

At least Gaara isn't solely at fault for his sins, and while there is a very real risk that he might kill Kankurou – he shrugs, aware a burning desert watered with the blood of civil war is not a life to be missed.

He allows himself a brief thought of Temari, pictures her blond and laughing among trees and water and friends.

It's a far cry from this sun-burned hellhole, which is good. Their sister at least should be spared this.

He slinks back into the cave, bestowing a quick, aggressive glance on Gaara before sighing in disgust and bending to check his sole surviving doll. He'll be able to fix the others, in time, if he can retrieve the parts. There are certain definite pros about having inanimate subordinates.

They'll be the only ones intact, he's ready to bet. The sand itself has been torched, then drenched again and again in blood so thick it becomes blackish.

The desert is thirsty, though. Kankurou once thought of it as benevolent, in a stern stark fashion, but the voice of their land has whispered in Gaara's ears for years now, and he knows quite well how his little brother has reacted to those commands.

Their father said once, _He killed Shiori_.

Kankurou was confused at the time, kneeling with Temari in front of the only parent left to them, skin scratchy from the heavy material of their mourning clothes, eyes from a child's hysterical tears – wasn't Gaara only a baby? Hadn't Mother died in childbed, through cursed fate and bad luck?

Three years later Gaara stared empty lack of empathy through the gigantic bleeding hole his sand had ripped through the middle of a shocked Jounin, and Kankurou realized their father had had a point.

Fucking snake bastard who killed him (sure, father was a fucking bastard too, but he meant well, sometimes, and he was _our_ fucking bastard), but at least that one's fed the worms now. His father hasn't, which is grim consolation: the body will have dried out with dignity, buried in sand which harbors no life at all.

"Mother is speaking to me again," Gaara announces, sullen behind him.

"I don't hear anything," Kankurou sneers.

"She's hungry," Gaara lets him know. The implication does not need to be spoken: she is to be fed, whether it's by you or someone else doesn't matter.

"Soon," Kankurou promises him, calculating furiously, forcing sickness into effectiveness. "Soon."

He's not going to say: Fucking great, you little bastard. Tell her to shut the hell up, we're all hungry.

"Naruto," Gaara says then, wistful and lost and so childish Kankurou understands that cruelty comes naturally to him. Children are always the cruelest, the most creative in their malice. "He told me not to listen to her."

"Naruto's a good guy," Kankurou says. Naive little shit, but tough when it matterd.

Kankurou will need to be as well. Not that he really worries about that – he has waded through blood, backstabbed and dueled, for months. Will for years, he knows that, provided he lives that long.

He thinks he _probably_ wants to stay alive and find out, hopes to be proven wrong about what that survival is likely to entail.

"She's hungry," Gaara whines again.

Kankurou kicks the doll into the wall and stares out into the punishing brightness, at the burned, sacked village beneath them, repeats the promise, the vow that'll condemn him if there is any justice in this world: "Soon."

xxxxxxxxxx


	39. Chronicles of Uchiha Itachi II

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 39:**

"**Chronicles of Uchiha Itachi"**

Itachi is not a normal child. This is almost the first knowledge he has.

(the very first impression, furthest back, deepest inside him, is warmth and a scent and careful calloused hands, a mumble of a certain voice, a blurry vision of redness; his lack of normalcy is simply the first awareness he can articulate)

Normal children are not able to graduate the Academy when they are still shy of four.

Normal children don't have red eyes.

He is well aware that it disturbs Iruka-sensei, the unnatural eye color and the inherent ability to execute any demonstrated move (he walked the second his legs could support him, ran an hour later), just like the man's uncomfortable about his vocabulary and determination and absolutely perfect scores on every test.

Itachi is rather satisfied with his teacher's reaction.

After all, he is a special person, and average people are wont to recognize specialness. Iruka-sensei's touchiness is confirmation, nothing more and nothing less, of what Itachi knows (_needs desperately to believe_).

After all, his …parent… is very special; at a very young age Itachi presumed Sasuke was his father, and still considers the deduction sound, but Naruto laughed and has been needling them both ever since about Sasuke's being his _Mooom_.

"Forget it," Sasuke sneered at last. "And shut the fuck up, Naruto. Just call me by name."

Alright, Itachi had cautiously agreed.

He'd become used, at that point, to hearing very disturbing suggestions about their family. Had once asked Kakashi-sensei, whom he knew had been Sasuke's teacher as well a long time ago, something about Sasuke's Sharingan: everyone stopped and stared at Itachi's, and it had been explained to him it was because he was so young, but surely his parent must also have had his activated at an early age?

Kakashi-sensei shook his head, looking rather definitely amused. "Nope," he said, and Itachi fought to keep his expression neutral and unsurprised. "Actually, Sasuke was a fairly normal brat, all things considered. Didn't get his Sharingan going until he was twelve, though that was probably the trauma."

"The trauma?" Itachi repeated. "The massacre? His brother."

"Ah," Kakashi-sensei agreed, looking into the far distance. "His brother."

"So," he still had a hard time processing this, "he wasn't…" He searched for an appropriate word, came up empty.

"Sasuke was a later bloomer," Kakashi-sensei said, clearly realizing this would be a lengthy discussion since he stopped putting off treating his wounds; he was only just returned from a though mission. Itachi watched in fascination as his teacher's shirt came undone, exposing several deep wounds tracing redly over the multitude of ugly scars. Kakashi-sensei drenched bandages in alcohol, grimaced fleetingly as he started wrapping the fabric around his torso.

"I could help," Itachi offered, and surprisingly Kakashi-sensei let him. Probably he was a little drunk, on sake or painkillers, and tired still.

_Sasuke was a later bloomer_, he'd said; continued now, as though speaking to himself: "Your father, though…"

_My father?_

It is obvious this is not a light subject. If Sasuke wanted him to know, Sasuke would have told him – or perhaps it is a test, of a kind?

(if i want to find out i need to do so by my own means?)

Please god, he thinks. Please god don't let it be Naruto.

The obnoxious, incomprehensible demon host, intimidating because Itachi _doesn't understand_ – there is no logic he can deduct behind the blond's actions, which means he is liable to do anything, anytime, and how can you ever feel certain around that?

Sasuke is easier, though everyone else in the world seems to consider him scary and strange. This just proves Itachi's theory that people in general are not very bright.

He remembers Morino Ibiki-sensei, the regal respectful man, saying once, to someone else: "He's a traitor twice over, but – efficient."

Of course Itachi has seen Sasuke before missions, intense and preoccupied in that crisp black outfit.

Of course he has seen Sasuke after missions, the blood on him.

Thank god Itachi is special, can work desperately every hour every day to become more special, to deserve that.

Naruto is a study in contrast, compared to that: Sasuke is consistent.

Even when Sasuke is close to him, talking to him or training him, he is perfect. Untouchable, unreachable. Lethal and so desperately idolized; so very desperately adored.

Naruto is the one who tries to play with him (because, itachi has heard it presumed, sasuke doesn't know how. but sasuke can do anything, so that can't be true. it must be because of something else, because itachi hasn't – quite – deserved), Naruto who tries to hug him if he's had a nightmare and tells him it's alright to cry, let yourself live, it doesn't matter what happens, you'll always be precious, this is _family_.

Itachi knows all of that is a lie, and besides he doesn't _want_ to play or be held like some weakling child.

What would Naruto know about family?

Besides, he's seen Naruto kill, the animal fury that froze him with equal parts chakra paralyzis and awed fear. I have seen the red chakra, the red eyes; Itachi knows.

(it is entirely different from sasuke's casual, in-control mastery of death)

There was that once in Sound, when rebellious elements from that village had joined forces with certain judgmental Leaf shinobi and decided to attack him. Itachi has never forgotten the subsequent surprise, gratification and burning humiliation caused by Naruto immediately stepping between him and danger, so naturally, so instinctively, as though no other course of action had ever even flitted through the empty blond head.

That signaled the temporary end of having Sakura-san-san for his babysitter: evidently it wasn't "safe, for either one of you, Sakura."

Itachi understands the lady in question if possible less than he comprehends Naruto.

Since everyone important (sasuke, kakashi-sensei, and, grudgingly admitted onto the list, naruto) so obviously care for her she has to be special, be precious and accomplished in some way, but Itachi can't see it and it drives him mad that he's apparently so far below her level he can't even make a reasonable conjecture on her prowess.

At least other people he has a hard time with are understandable. You know where you have Jiraiya-sama, the gruff drunkard, and at least he's plainly strong. You know _approximately_ where you have the intimidating lady with the slanted eyes who is Hokage.

All of which means he was hardly sorry Sakura-san was not to baby-sit him. The fever-hot indignity of being perceived as in need of a caretaker is muted at least by training when it's one of the others. Kakashi-sensei he likes, and Sasuke he (_loves desperately_) admires, and Naruto, whatever his numerous other failings, knows how to throw a punch and mold chakra.

Sakura-san has assumed for some reason that the best course of action is to speak softly to him, offer him children's books and toys. Once she showed him a few healing jutsu, which was admittedly rather interesting.

Thank god she is not his mother. Hope to heaven once again that Naruto is not my father, because then I will _never_ be worthy. Sasuke says all the time that Naruto is an idiot and a hopeless waste of air with no talent, and Itachi does not have the endless chakra or freaky healing ability that justifies Naruto in spite of these earlier observations.

Nor does he think he could do – those other things Naruto is good for.

He'd die if he tried really fighting Sasuke, he couldn't have his back, and he'd… well, he wouldn't exactly want to sleep with him, even if it were possible.

He sort of hopes it is Kakashi-sensei.

Yes, the man is a little older, but then aren't fathers supposed to be? And he's skilled, and subtle, and he has the Sharingan. Itachi presumes he lost the other one in some kind of accident and had to substitute it with a normal eye, which is a pity. It is even clear Kakashi-sensei is …very fond… of Sasuke, studies him with what could be a resigned version of Itachi's own demented obsession.

It could be, right?

Even though he is aware it is generally the father who shares a bed and bickers at breakfast with the mother. Even though he has these ugly suspicions about Anko-sensei, who doesn't like his eyes but doesn't seem to mind him, especially as he's seen _her_ bicker with Kakashi-sensei over breakfast.

It could still be. They could have – gone their separate paths, or something. Besides, who else could it be?

He rubs his face to get rid of these pointless thoughts, reconnecting with reality through the touch. He is graduating the Academy today and needs to make himself presentable before he leaves.

Seeing the note on the kitchen table, he realizes the familiar (dreaded – no, don't be a _child_) muted noises he heard during the night were indeed quite real.

He barely needs to look at the concise message, but procrastination is cowardly and useless so he reads the hastily scrawled words before starting breakfast:_ Left for mission with Naruto. Will be back in a few days. Kakashi will pick you up from school, stay with him until further notice._

The rice grows in his mouth, but he chews dutifully, washing his dishes before he feeds Inku and leaves, scurrying over rooftops in the Compound, walking fast but dignified on the roads of the village proper. He is an Uchiha: needs to train, needs to maintain face.

The school grounds are crowded as usual; also parts to let him pass as usual. Whether they are scared or disgusted or enviously awed by his red glare, they step back.

With the preparations for war and the severity of the many missions, the village is perpetually short on qualified shinobi: the Ninja Academy classes don't graduate together anymore. Itachi simply walks past his old classroom ten minutes before the lesson is to start, continues into the teachers' lounge behind the farthest door in the hallway.

"Itachi-kun," Iruka-sensei greets him, customarily nervous and cheery, scratching at the large scar on his nose. Itachi pauses in his evaluation of the room to wonder how the man got it, since as far as he is aware Iruka-sensei has never actually been on a real mission, much less battled. "On time as usual! Your parents must be so proud."

"I only have one parent," Itachi reminds him blandly. _And if graduating was enough to make him proud of me he'd have loved me by now_.

(once when sasuke and naruto fought, the blond sneered, in the mistaken belief itachi had not come home yet: "come _on_, sasuke! you're giving him the same crappy childhood you had!"

"you know nothing about my childhood. i was _happy_!" sasuke snapped. "getting something for free just means it's worthless. leave it."

itachi did not want to let them know he had heard, but it is useless trying to keep anything from them. it was never mentioned again, all the same)

"Ah," Iruka-sensei says now. "Of course. I just – I mean Naruto does live with you, I took the liberty of presuming one might regard him as a parent as well."

"He's not," Itachi insists tonelessly. _Don't let him be_.

"I know," Iruka-sensei says, and looks rather sad. "I know that." He forces a grin, taking a bundle of cloth from a drawer. "Now, what have we here?"

Itachi accepts the offered item, unwraps the fabric to reveal the headband with the freshly glinting Leaf symbol. "Thank you for everything, Iruka-sensei," he says politely, bows correctly.

"Good luck with your future, Itachi-kun."

Well aware Kakashi-sensei is always late, Itachi does not stupidly stay around to wait but starts back home to pick up his things – if whatever mission came up was bad enough they needed both Sasuke and Naruto, it stands to reason they will be gone for a few days at least, just like the note said.

His pack has been waiting beside the door for quite some time when Kakashi-sensei knocks, prompting Itachi to look up from his occupation with Inku. Perhaps it is not very adult to have a bunny rabbit, but the animal provides perfect companionship: quiet, steady, never annoying or in the way.

(he is aware people are not supposed to remember that far back in their lives, but he does not pander to average norms and is able to recall certain words uttered in connection to his getting the animal.

naruto's voice, brash and disbelieving: "you cannot be serious! sasuke, even you couldn't…! he's a _child_! your child! it's an innocent baby rabbit and a kid, you can't!"

sasuke's level, angry tone: "would you prefer we waited until he was older? when it would have to be a human, probably one of us? he's going to need the power, and this is the best way."

then a bundle of warm, soft furriness was placed beside him in the cradle, and the animal has remained with him ever since)

"Yo," Kakashi-sensei greets, stepping familiarly into the house.

"Hello, Kakashi-sensei," Itachi replies promptly, proving he at least was raised correctly.

"You got back from the Academy alright, I take it?"

"Of course. Should we be on our way?"

Kakashi-sensei nods, bends to take the waiting backpack while Itachi lifts Inku, arranging the rabbit with the comfortable expertise that comes of long companionship.

"How are things to be arranged now?" Itachi asks eventually, and it is clear from his comfortable skill at this task that he is not referring to putting his things away in Kakashi-sensei's apartment.

"You'd outgrow your teams faster than they could get you new ones, and you know we're short on teachers." Kakashi-sensei's kitchen is mildly messy; Itachi sits on a counter, which he isn't allowed to do at home, and watches the man eat a haphazard breakfast. "Sasuke, Naruto and I will continue to train you between mission, and I suspect you will be assigned some of those yourself. Easy ones, of course, as yet, with varying Genin teams."

"Right," Itachi says, nicking salad and offering it to Inku. "The Sound Academy?"

"After you've made Chuunin," Kakashi-sensei replies.

"On whose authority do you have that info?" Not a challenge, just a bland inquiry.

"Ibiki's. He claimed to be quoting Sasuke."

"Right," Itachi repeats.

Sound, now it is becoming an established village, has its own children to deal with for the first time, denizens born into it rather than recruited as comparatively adult, and as such has seen the need to establish a Ninja Academy of its own. Smaller, scruffier, and considerably rougher. Itachi hears the student death rate is seven times Leaf's.

If he is indeed the designated heir, he'll need to go through it. And a lot of people from both villages seem to assume he is, and testing himself against people who won't hold back so much would definitely be an opportunity. Of course, there are limits to how true a measurement you can gain of yourself when everyone is aware your parents (because yes, this once it applies to naruto as well) will slaughter anyone who damages you, when you're too young and too famous.

Kakashi-sensei brings him to one of the training grounds, the one where Itachi knows he tested what would become Team Seven almost eight years ago.

Late that afternoon Kakashi-sensei declines a mission and cooks curry for them. Pleasantly tired from the earlier workout, Itachi sleeps well in the familiar extra bed, listening to Kakashi-sensei's snores and Inku's sniffles.

The following day he is told he has been assigned a D-rank. Assembling his gear, tying the headband with embarrassing solemnity, he sets out to meet his temporary team.

The girl gives him a huffy once-over while the boy smiles at him tentatively. Distance, the fear it breeds, can take so many shapes.

It turns out the mission in and of itself is ludicrously simple – honestly, most tests back in the Academy, though better supervised and therefore safer, were more challenging than retrieving lost pets. Itachi focuses his Sharingan, locating the particular weak flare of animal chakra that must be the cat's. He has defended Inku from enough felines to be well versed in how to sneak up on one, and in how to clamp his hand fast and relentless around the scruff of its neck.

This time he isn't going to twist the neck, though.

Afterwards he returns to Kakashi-sensei's, spends another night there.

Around noon the next day Sasuke knocks; Itachi's outdoor training was postponed when it was discovered some ailment appears to be afflicting Inku, who's sneezing and curling into a shivering little ball.

He looks up from the suffering animal when Sasuke's chakra permeates the room, sees a faintly pleased expression on the sculptured white face. There isn't a speck of blood on him, not the merest trace of injury, just a bit of bark in his hair and a few tears in his shirt.

Itachi knows what conclusions to draw from that, tells himself he is childish for even thinking Sasuke could have come with him to graduation instead of keeping busy with Naruto in the woods.

"How'd it go?" Kakashi-sensei asks, standing up from his inspection of Inku.

"Fucking goose-chase," Sasuke huffs. "We searched for trails and chakra signatures for days, came up with a bunch of civilian woodcutters. Whatever idiot called us in had not bothered to confirm his findings. Naruto was nagging me about going home practically since the moment we set out."

Right, Itachi thinks. Naruto would have wanted to come to my graduation, trade awkward greetings with Iruka-sensei and offer to treat him to ramen.

Sasuke, like a proper ninja, rated the mission higher on his list of priorities, and they must have fought about it. It's not exactly unusual that that leads to other exchanges, more intimate if no less violent. They don't want him to know about any of that, so it's kind of a given they took the opportunity now.

"Welcome back," Itachi says softly. "I… was able to graduate."

"Yes," Sasuke says. "I know that."

Itachi stares at him, trying to decipher the neutral, relaxed face, watches Sasuke glance at Inku.

"Rabbit plague, I'm afraid," says Kakashi-sensei.

Something inside Itachi clenches.

Sasuke nods, sinks down to kneel beside Itachi. He feels the chakra and body heat, the weak smells of forest and sweat. Mission smells, just like blood and metal. He carefully does not look at Sasuke, can't tear his suddenly aching eyes from Inku, is distantly aware his hand trembles on the slick fur.

Kakashi-sensei discreetly turns away, busying himself with the familiar paperback novel Itachi has been strictly forbidden to so much as sneak a peek at.

"Plague isn't curable," Sasuke says softly, and Itachi nods jerkily. Everyone knows there's no treatment and no survivors. "It's unnecessary to have him suffer."

"I – I know," Itachi forces out, feeling numb.

_I don't want to know. I don't want to see it done._

Sasuke's tone is still inflectionless and oh so relentless. It's the commanding voice. "You're the one who's responsible for Inku, Itachi."

Oh please no.

"I know," he says again, and his voice sounds like he has a bad cold, all croaky and weak.

And there is a kunai in his hand, and strangely he is not shaking anymore.

How are you supposed to come up with any fitting last words for a suffering animal you've loved all your life?

He sets his mouth, easing Inku gently into his lap, stroking the damp fur and the impossibly soft ears, gingerly gripping around the animal's head, exposing the throat. His other hand firms around the weapon.

_Rabbit plague, I'm afraid._

_Plague isn't curable. It's unnecessary to have him suffer._

_You're the one responsible for Inku, Itachi._

I know.

Which makes this necessary.

Being a ninja is about doing what you have to do. Facing down hardships. Looking underneath the underneath.

And a ninja is what he has to be, what he was _born_ to be. If I am a ninja I can be perfect, if I am not a ninja I am nothing.

The Heir Apparent of the Uchiha Clan.

He slashes fast and mercilessly, hand steady and starkly white around the handle of the weapon, leans reflexively away from the blood.

He's staring mutely over an endless shaky distance at limp black fur and warm blood drenching his lap in its disgusting moistness and _my eyes are burning._

At first he thinks this is because tears are trying to fall, but as the pain escalates and no wetness comes and he feels dizzy from how detailed his vision is, that can' be right.

Fingertips on his face, rough circular patches of skin, a grip that gently, inexorably lifts his face, tilts it towards Sasuke for inspection.

Itachi must have done something right at last because there is obvious approval in the dark eyes he has never seen so clearly before.

He's at a loss as though what he's done to deserve it.

"I," he says, pathetically. Almost sniffs.

"Relax your chakra," Sasuke orders, soothing. "You don't have the amount or control necessary to sustain the Mangekyou yet."

Inku is lying dead across my knees and I repeat, voice breaking in something that _isn't_ hysteria: "Mangekyou…?"

_To achieve the Mangekyou Sharingan, the ultimate technique, the supreme Bloodline Limit that none can withstand, inherited from the gods of old, you need spill the life blood of an Uchiha or of one loved by an Uchiha._

"Yes," Sasuke says simply, smiling faintly with what could be pride or satisfaction or even relief.

"Perhaps a burial would be in order," Kakashi-sensei interjects, and Itachi is horrifyingly grateful for his input. For his presence (proud as well, not so judging).

For a long terrible moment Itachi is certain Sasuke will say raise an eyebrow, find it a silly idiocy.

He doesn't. Nods, closes a hand around Itachi's shoulder, which is rare enough Itachi must treasure it regardless of circumstances.

Inku is burned by the Katon Gokayu no Jutsu, ashes spread over the lake in the Compound.

(_he served well_, itachi can imagine hearing)

That night Itachi lies awake for a long time, eyes closed over an endless redness. He is in possession of the Mangekyou Sharingan.

He is three years old.

Through the wall he hears Naruto, voice rough with something that tries and fails to be anger. "Fuck, Sasuke, you're treating him like a subordinate. Can't you see the poor thing has the bad taste to love you? He just killed his best friend! Give him something back."

Itachi lies stiffly, can't hear Sasuke say anything but presumes he must have because Naruto continues.

"Don't tell me you wouldn't have done anything for your parents to acknowledge you when you were a kid."

And now he does hear Sasuke reply, and freezes, because it makes no sense.

"But he's nothing like I was. He's just like Itachi."

"Fucking fitting," Naruto grumbles. "And if your dad hadn't been such a dick, maybe _he_ wouldn't have turned out the way he did. No, shit, sorry. Sasuke, I'm sorry. I didn't mean that."

That's when Itachi realizes there's another Itachi.

He resolves not to ask about it.

Next day Naruto gives him a look of wan happiness, something like pity and pride mixed into one, his gaze just sweeping over Itachi's eyes.

He has heard the blond received a Tsukiyomi once, wonders how it would feel like to be able to perform that, hold a person's soul in his hands (in my eyes).

"Be careful with the Mangekyou," Sasuke tells him at breakfast. "Your chakra needs to mature before you can master it."

"Heh," Naruto interjects, breaking the solemn mood with his loud, teasing tones. "I remember _someone_ who was in quite a hurry to use his…"

"I wasn't three," Sasuke snaps.

"No," Naruto agrees. "What were you, fifteen? Talk about slow, huh? Almost retarded, I'd say."

"You're one to talk, Naruto."

A broad grin. "Yes I am. Always."

Sasuke mutters sounding that sounds suspiciously like a fond, "Why do I bother" into his tea.

Later Naruto crouches uncomfortably in front of Itachi and says he's sorry about Inku.

Itachi bows stiffly. "Thank you for your consideration."

"Hey," Naruto protests, awkward, like it's terrible it wasn't obvious that: "That's not what I meant."

And someone's hugging him, the indignity, and _you're the wrong person_, and he gives Naruto the filthiest glare he can muster, which actually forces the blond back a pace.

Itachi is glad when his obnoxious not-parent leaves on a single mission, gladder still when he hears Naruto isn't expected back for more than a week.

Itachi is well aware that Sasuke has endless issues to attend to, task after task that must be seen to – missions, training, the governing of Sound. Sometimes, like today, he lets Itachi come along to learn through observation.

He especially likes to watch Sasuke fight, Sharingan straining to keep up with the beautifully perfect moves he wonders if he shall ever be able to properly imitate. I love watching it and I feel sick watching it, panicking over my own imperfection.

They are on their way through the Hokage Tower when raised voices from Tsunade-sama's office attract attention.

"What do you mean, you can't do anything?" a shrill female voice cries. "My daughter has devoted her entire life to your service!"

"As I said," comes Tsunade-sama's familiar murmur, tainted now by weariness and something bitter, "I'm very sorry, but this is a time of crisis, and your daughter, I regret saying, does not possess the kind of ability that makes her a priority. You are of course free to commission for a mission, but the administration must stop at offering you our sincerest regrets."

Another voice rises in protest, male this time, but is interrupted by running footsteps and a bold declaration: "Fear not, gentle citizens, for I will rescue the beautiful Sakura-san!"

Sasuke's eyes look very red in the absolutely white face.

Itachi jogs the last meters, watches from the sidelines as Sasuke slams into the Hokage Office.

"What has happened to Sakura?" he grounds out, emotions so tightly leased he seems likely to explode, a wild feel to his chakra.

Itachi has never seen him like this. Furious and passionate, losing some shred of control, yes, but never – afraid?

"She's been abducted!" Rock Lee cries. "But, alas, I shall reclaim her!"

"No," Sasuke says, and there are cold, confident hands around Itachi's chest, lifting him, forcing him into Lee's arms. "Take care of Itachi. I'm going after Sakura."

xxxxxxxxxx


	40. The Woman who launched 1000 ships

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 40:**

"**The Woman who Launched a Thousand Ships"**

Tsunade wishes she could think anything (oh, anything) but: Orochimaru would not have done that (for me).

Sasuke isn't properly her subordinate, and Naruto would throw a worse fit than this if he realized Sakura was gone with no attempts made at rescue, and she does rather like the girl; an asset, and kind. Because of this Tsunade says, in a calm inflectionless voice: "She and Ino were out to pick up medical herbs. Half an hour ago, however, Ino staggered back into the village, badly hurt, and reported they'd been attacked by a gang of enemy shinobi, who apparently brought Sakura with them."

"Don't talk about me like I'm not here," Ino protests reflexively, sitting in the extra chair with a pained mien and a hand clutching at her stomach. Shizune has done the preliminary healing, but sluggish bleeding still colors her outfit red.

"Where?" Sasuke snaps.

"The forest," Ino gulps, can't tear her eyes from the murderous expression on his face. He's all rage, of the furious kind that cannot be contained inside a body reaching less than a hundred and sixty centimeters above the ground. "On the border, an hour from the windmill just inside Water Country. I – I can't remember exactly."

"Try harder." Sasuke sneers the order with nothing short of hatred, fisting a hand in her hair, jerking her body up and forward to stare mad redness into her pain-wide eyes.

He doesn't scream: _I should have known you weren't good enough to take care of her, goddammit, I did know you weren't good enough, how dare you be here when she is not?_

Tsunade raises her voice in shocked (despite everything) reprimand while Rock Lee grabs his arms, tugs him forcefully around.

Sasuke stares hatred at him too, is moving to retaliate before he catches sight of Itachi, still held against the other's chest, and remembers what matters.

"Please," Mrs. Haruno interjects. "_Please_."

He nods shortly, jerkily.

He promised once, after he'd fallen into the gap in reality, that he wouldn't lose any more precious people.

(broken promises, naruto has taught them both, are the most resilient kind)

Thought is pointless, impossible: the facts that _I am getting her back_ and that _someone is going to pay_ are thick realties, dark streams in the redness.

xxxxx

(the war starts for two reasons. naruto is part of them both, though he is the central figure of neither one of the trigger events)

This mission of his is supposed to be a tough one, which isn't unwelcome: challenges are what push you forward. Besides, there is preciously little that can be won through anything as simple or straightforward as a fight, these days.

Solo missions remind him of being scorned, but with all the trouble lately he can hardly remember last time he was sent on anything below A-rank, which means Kyuubi must be let out to play as well. This in turn means there are rather few people he can partner with; Sasuke, Jiraiya, Kakashi, Neji, Gai, Ibiki, Anko. Needless to say their schedules do not always match (halfway through that one terribly awkward mission with gai and jiraiya he wished they hadn't).

Right now it might even be good to leave Itachi alone with Sasuke (with inku gone and the mangekyou in evidence). It's just, Naruto knows, can't help knowing, that Sasuke is clueless when it comes to appropriate behavior towards the child.

(_he's nothing like i was. he's just liked itachi_)

He thinks about bodies sometimes, what they are used for. Couldn't not, after all that has happened. His own, a container for a demon, a god's prison, the ritual sacrifice of a scared cowed village. Yeah well, he can deal with it, with the power and immortality and the red fog seeping through his mind (probably).

(i think)

Sasuke's, which has been through so many incarnations, proven such a splendid tool for any kind of task. Host for a person who has used more than his fair share of mortal shells.

All humans, trapped in death's bondage through their bodies, which are necessary for life.

Kyuubi whispers to him about this, about the pleasure and the pain, the madness of physicality, raw instinct, reflexive emotion.

(i've done some unforgivable things, you know:

_i think violated him, once, when no birds sang, and i think that we were screaming there outside the inn just inside the border, and we broke and we are still breaking_)

Naruto has never heard as much as he wants (more than i ever wanted) about Massacre Night and what existed before it, but he'd have to be a complete idiot not to realize that the Itachi who committed that crime took away forever the Sasuke who would have been capable of handling the Itachi that lives now. Our Itachi.

Or not really. Not Naruto's Itachi, the strange little person, the reminder of everything that has ever gone wrong between Naruto and Sasuke.

And he – I don't know what I think about that, anymore.

Irony isn't his thing any more than bitterness, but they aren't lost on him.

Fuck you very much, Murphy.

Keeping Kyuubi in check is definitely a priority, hence it takes him a fair while to travel through the forest. At the edge of it, however, these priorities must change – he senses a, a prickle of unease; turns towards it, has it confirmed very firmly; _something is here that should not be_.

Kyuubi's pulse beating steadily through his veins after all, he crashes out of the cover of the trees and into a surreal scene, one like a nightmare turned into art, so stereotypical that the horror can barely penetrate the viewer's psyche.

The smell of blood is thick, the grass underneath his feet smeared with it. He sees parts of what should amount to… two? three? ...bodies, almost steps on a pathetically grasping arm, severed just above the elbow. Dead eyes stare at him out of a face he vaguely recognizes – could it be, isn't that (_oh shit oh no_) – Kiba's sister's kid?

He has no time to be certain, looks away from the glaring redness on the cheeks that might be blood or paint or both, looks up to focus on the standing figures.

Two of them, both swathed in the horrid black robes with the red cloud designs he hasn't seen in years, occupied with something on the ground between them, one of them turning to give Naruto a lazy, dismissive glance.

"Do it," he tells his companion, who moves more clumsily than Naruto would have expected of an Akatsuki (is he hurt? _is that blood on his stomach?)_ which still means with a grace only a few shinobi a generation manage to achieve. A blade describes a perfect, glimmering arch through the damp air, and a shrill scream overpowers the sound of metal slicing through flesh.

This is when Naruto realizes that the object they are focusing on is in fact a girl. Alive, still.

A girl whose leg is now thrown at him, a bone to a dog, by the smirking Akatsuki who told his companion to cut it off.

Well. That's an invitation to battle if he's ever received one before.

"You sick fucks!" he bellows. "How _dare_ you!"

And charges.

Ducks below the first man's swipe, catches a brief glimpse of the lying girl, a study in white and red, kicks at the sword-wielder.

He's furious, sad somewhere beneath it and far away, hardly feels the blade graze him before his skin has closed up flawlessly. Wonders what would happen if they cut his limbs off – how long with it take before they regenerated?

_Would I die even if they beheaded me?_

Questionable. This guy does though, after Naruto's forced the sword from him and swung it with all his power.

Easier than expected, that one: probably really was injured, incredible as that would seem. After all, Kiba's nephew must have been Chuunin at best, so who could have fought back successfully?

The other guy is trickier by far, demands several dozen clones and a generous handful Rasengan before he grudgingly concedes to go down, but then he does and Naruto is on his knees beside the girl.

In one way he recognizes her instantly, because the wide, dry eyes staring into the sky are unmistakably blank and violet. No one but the Hyuuga have eyes even remotely like the Byakugan.

In another way he's at a complete loss as to her identity, because there isn't a Hyuuga with white hair. A little girl, maybe fourteen, adding on some years the trauma robs her off.

"Hanabi," he says.

Her left leg ends just below the knee, her right halfway down the calf. Her chest, laid bare to the chill air, looks crushed in on itself.

"I'm going to take you home," he says, and tries to be gentle. "Before that I, I need to stop the bleeding."

"I see," she says, and her tone is measured, her voice clawing its way out of a cramped blood-drowning throat, her eyes steadily blank on the sky overhead. "Do what you must."

"I – Right." Meaningless babble sits choking in the back of his mouth, won't be swallowed back, won't spill forth. He gathers chakra in his hand, chakra so pure it burns, presses it to where her leg abruptly ends.

She makes a hoarse, wet sound that's nothing like a scream as the energy burns the meaty wounds closed.

With no medical expertise he doesn't dare touch her chest, gathers her into his arms with infinite gentleness.

She says nothing at all until hours later, when he's been hurrying back towards Leaf at a pace that's too fast to be walking but too cautious to constitute running, a clone sent ahead for help.

"It was just supposed to be a simple B-rank," she says. "And since I was free, and Jiro had just passed his Chuunin Exam, we could go together, like when we were all Genin. But that wasn't – they just turned up, and I should have noticed earlier, I should have been more cautious. They never had a chance. Jiro was – he was just a newbie Chuunin, and Rei was only Genin. I – I tried, but they were _dying_, all around, and after I'd gotten in that one really good hit Jiro's head was just _off_, and then." She shuts her mouth tightly and does not speak again.

"I," Naruto says, but then Shizune is there, ANBU and medics in anxious lines behind her, and Hanabi is gone from him.

Spotting her intensely snow-white hair among the cluster of adults, he belatedly realizes the new color he'd forgotten all about must be due to shock, pigment dying from abrupt terror.

_What the hell did they do to her?_

"Uzumaki," someone says. "_Uzumaki_. Go report to the Hokage. Your mission is on hold."

xxxxx

Rock Lee looks at Itachi quizzically before slowly, contemplatingly lowering him to stand by himself.

_Sasuke lifting him like a helpless thing in need of protection. Sasuke saying: Take care of Itachi._

Of course Itachi has never doubted that Sasuke considers him less than adequate, as measured against adults. Doesn't want him left on his own.

Equally naturally the awareness has been with him for as long as he can remember that no one is allowed to damage him. He is the precious heir, after all, the bloodline's link to the future.

He has never dared conjecture much personal feeling into this.

He wonders now if the possessive focus (the competent, comfortable grip) was anything more than spillover from the reaction to the Sakura-san situation.

Decides the Hokage Office is not an optimal location to ponder the subject.

"So, um," Lee-san says. "Itachi-kun, right?"

"Yes," Itachi says simply, watching with some apprehension as the green-clad man warms to the topic.

"Great! It has been too long since I've had the opportunity to reveal to new generations the glories of the springtime of youth!"

And if Itachi had been a normal child from a normal family he'd have probably bought the stupid enthusiasm, rolled his eyes to mask a vague sense of being intrigued.

Itachi, who grew up with Sasuke, who has always needed to read the subtle shades of dark eyes and cunning lips, recognizes the strain of falsity in Rock Lee's face.

"I suppose you might as well take him, until further notice," Tsunade-sama sighs. "We'll leave him with one of the Genin instructors if you're needed."

The civilian adults are staring at him: he's seen them before but only briefly. Finally the woman lifts her eyes to ask: "Sakura…?"

"Uchiha Sasuke," Tsunade-sama says with a kind of reluctant pride, "is the best ninja in Sound and one of the best in Leaf. If there is any way on earth to bring your daughter back, he will do it."

"Yes!" Lee exclaims. "For the perfect Sakura-san!"

Itachi abruptly feels the stirrings of a migraine.

xxxxx

Hour later Tsunade is staring levelly at the Kyuubi host. She cannot help knowing, from the report his shadow replication delivered: _this means war._

The Akatsuki must be back in action, an organization again, and reasonably they have recruited.

Hyuuga Hanabi, the Leaf princess, coveted genius of the oldest bloodline of them all, a girl of fifteen.

Her Genin team slaughtered, her body broken possibly beyond repair in the borderlands. Her mind?

"Give me the report," she says, and steels herself for hearing how strong the Akatsuki must have grown, that they should dare this.

"I," says Naruto. "It was – grotesque. So brutal you could just." He closes his eyes for a second. "They had been chopping the bodies apart bit by bit for fun."

"Oh," Tsunade says. Knows it must have been a pretty awful sight for Naruto to be affected, after all he's done himself, all the blood on his hands and all the grime on his conscience.

"Yeah," Naruto exhales. "There were two of them. One with a blade, he went down pretty fast – Hanabi got to him before she was…incapacitated. The other was tougher, but, you know."

"I don't think it's wise for you to rely so heavily on Kyuubi, Naruto."

"You'd rather I was dead?"

She ignores that, figures it'll be worse if he hears it later from someone else so says: "Sakura's been abducted. Uchiha set out to retrieve her."

Funny, she thinks distantly, that despite being so much a study in contrast, Naruto and Sasuke can be so very alike sometimes.

His face is white as Hanabi's hair now, and he hisses the predictable "What?" at her with venom worthy of Orochimaru himself.

"You heard me, I believe," Tsunade replies. "I'm sure we can trust Uchiha to reclaim her."

"When'd he leave?" Naruto demands, and Tsunade realizes Naruto can risk no such thing. "Where to?"

"Two hours ago, thereabout." (i cannot afford to order most of anbu to keep nartuo here, can i?)

He nods with a detached kind of focus at her directions, looking his body's age, younger: with Kyuubi so awake, he stopped physically degenerating entirely when he was sixteen. A contrast to Sasuke in that at least, with the Uchiha looking so far older than he is, wrinkled and worn, if no less pretty.

Sasuke's body was not crafted for the strain of twice its intended chakra in addition to the Mangekyou.

She'll be surprised if he lives to see the far side of thirty without his chakra burning out, destroying his body in the process.

Not my problem, she tells herself, refusing to wonder whether he is aware of this. Whether either one of them is.

xxxxx

Lee has no idea what to do with the kid. None whatsoever, which leads to horrible anxiety about his potential future as a Genin instructor.

This is Sasuke's son, the mentally scarred genius with the Bloodline Limit eyes Lee won't ever be able to match.

The perfect ninja child.

With Sakura-san gone and his own thoughts in a buzz, Lee finally decides to take the boy sparring, which brooks no argument from Itachi-kun. Clearly he's been taught he is to be seen and not heard in adult company, much as that doctrine clashes with anything Naruto.

"How much taijutsu do you know?" Lee asks in the clearing Gai-sensei usually brought them to, attempting to gain a rough estimate on how much he needs to hold back.

"I'm good for a Genin," Itachi-kun says tonelessly, giving the impression he's quoting someone. There's the barest hint of resentful hurt to the marginally sullen voice, like the words are an insult.

Probably his genjutsu and ninjutsu are above Genin level, then.

Very shortly it turns out whoever made the judgment on Itachi-kun's taijutsu was accurate. He's quick, stronger than he looks – certainly splendid for his age, but not outstanding, as far as newbie (_twelve-year-old_) Genin go.

Afterwards he's bringing the child with him home – what else can he do, and even pretty, prissy little prodigies eat, or at least Neji does. The miniature Uchiha follows him quietly and obediently, barely responding, which might be just as well because with Sakura-san and Sasuke on his mind, Lee suspects this is not one of his more coherent monologues.

Fortunately before he's had time to do more than usher the kid into the kitchen and prepare the stove he's summoned for a mission, urgent, war starting in earnest.

Shit, he thinks, and promises himself a hundred laps as punishment for the profanity. Looks at Itachi-kun watching him with alert red eyes.

Lucky he's used to Neji's taciturn brooding or he'd be creeped out – and yes, there's an idea…

"Come on," he tells the boy with a plastered-on smile. "I'll drop you off at Aunt Hinata's. She has a son your age, it'll be great!"

It'll definitely be better than leaving a …what is he? …five-year-old (?) Genin to fend for himself, that's for damn certain. Tsunade-sama said to drop him off at someone else's house if Lee was needed, didn't she?

"'Aunt Hinata'?" Itachi-kun inquires, walking fast to keep up. "Hyuuga Hinata-san?"

"Yup," Lee says, giving him an absent thumbs-up.

Which is why, about two minutes later, Itachi finds himself standing alone in front of the intimidating gate to the Hyuuga portion of the village. Lee-san, apparently, was in a hurry, rushed off with a vague, painfully cheerful exhortation to the guards to "take the kid to Hinata, alright?"

"This way," one of them says without looking at him (or perhaps he does: itachi is not certain what range the milk-pale eyes have).

He's small and damp and alone in this gigantic maze which, in stark contrast to home, is filled with people who can presumably stare everywhere, see right through him without even looking, and _dammit, I am not a child_!

Hinata-san is sitting sedately in an inner room, serene and composed in a rosy kimono, the epitome of a lady. Itachi has never seen anything remotely similar, is used to associating beauty and station to raw strength.

"Hello?" she asks.

"Hinata-sama," the guard murmurs. "Rock Lee-san visited briefly and expressed his wish for you to accommodate this child."

"I see," says Hinata, and doesn't. "You may leave us."

Only hours earlier she was informed her sister has been critically maimed. Her world is still unsteady.

Left alone at last with the child, she eventually beckons for him to approach her, watching with her Byakugan as he obeys, not walking with the clumsy enthusiasm of her own son but the way adults move – with a trained, economical grace.

"I-Itachi-kun. Hello. I don't think we've properly met before."

He looks, she cannot help reflecting, exactly like an Uchiha is supposed to. A lot like both of his parents, in other words: delicate build, pale skin, inky hair. Very red eyes.

His lowers his head in greeting (and in useless but irresistible attempt to hide his face from prying glances).

"Have you eaten?" she asks. "No? This way, then; we were just about to have dinner."

Itachi follows her through the unfamiliar house, past screen-doors and polished ash-colored floors, into a smallish sitting room with traditional furniture, where they are joined by a boy who appears to be of roughly Itachi's own age, with Byakugan eyes and a toothy smile.

"Noh," Hinata says, "meet Uchiha Itachi. He'll be doing us the honor of being our guest for a bit."

Noh nods and his smile goes even wider, and his mother continues.

"Itachi-kun, this is my son, Noh."

Over the course of dinner it is once again made painfully obvious why Itachi has never played well (or at all) with other children. He practices his manners (watch this, mr. whatever's fine so long 's the food ends up in my mouth uzumaki!) and misses Inku so much it hurts.

The Mangekyou seem inadequate recompense, all of a sudden, and he knows he is weak for thinking this.

"Aunt Hanabi?" Noh asks at one point, and Hinata-san's face goes brittle and frosty.

"I don't know, Noh. Let us not talk about that now."

Afterwards Itachi is directed to an extra futon in Noh's room and shuts the boy up with a particularly quelling red stare.

He does not sleep so well, slips out of the room in the misty light of early dawn to wander the unknown building complex. Only a few servants, mild and fuzzy with sleep, are up and about, and their flat eyes sweep over him without comment or expression.

He feels like a ghost, exploring the Hyuuga mansion that is perhaps what the Uchiha Compound was supposed to be like. It's just hard to imagine forceful personalities here, a laughable exercise to superimpose Sasuke or Naruto over the drab grayness of this place (taken out of time, out of colored reality).

Eventually he finds his way into a garden, slips across the cold ground on hurried bare feet to sneak into an adjourning building. It seems abandoned; he'll just dry the dew off his feet, gather my thoughts.

But it isn't empty.

He stops in the slender hallway, looking startled and cautious through the half-open doorway revealing a considerable expanse of training area that must take up ninety percent of the building. At the figure in the middle of it, tall and white and elegant, ghost-skin and ghost-eyes and ghost-grace in his movements.

Hyuuga Neji-san, he thinks. The Heir Apparent of the Hyuuga Clan, Councilor of Sound, Byakugan prodigy, husband of Hinata-san, father of Noh. Cold, passive, cut-off.

Itachi watches as the man finishes his move then turns partway around, making it plain that Itachi has been spotted.

Slowly, still cautious, he steps forward, away from the shady protection of the hall, drops his head in greeting, in apology.

Neji-san looks at him with a limp kind of resentment.

"You look just like your father."

First the pleased burn, for the recognition that shouldn't mean anything but _does_, and then a – gradual freeze.

"My… father?" It is possible Neji-san is referring to Sasuke, but Itachi does not think so. The Hyuuga has never been inexact in his phrasing, never offered gloss or pleasantries.

"Your father," Neji-san repeats in a strange voice – rich, deep, far away like an echo. "Uchiha Itachi."

"I don't know what you mean." Anxiety grows in him; he almost snaps it, with little composure, because he does not want to be this desperate for understanding, for knowing.

Neji-san looks at him evenly for what feels like a very long time before he says, "I suppose that that was to be expected."

And the boy just continues to stare back, defiant and frightened, and Neji reminds himself forcibly, _he isn't Sasuke_. Just another broken genius child, and Neji is unwillingly clear on the fact that Uchiha Sasuke, regrettably much like Neji himself, knows nothing about how to mend things.

Itachi comes forward when Neji nods at him, looking like he's walking into a lion's den.

"Would you like to train?" Neji asks him, careful not to let any thought color his voice.

"I – yes."

Neji knows not to do this with Noh, remembers what happened to Hinata (beaten and beaten until she forgot the concept of winning, and their son is supposed to be an heir, and needs protection; and is loved, and should not be broken), but Itachi is not normal.

(and perhaps neji would like to break something, after all)

He parries, blocks, eyes glowing red. Neji spots the dark concentration of chakra beyond those Sharingan, startles at the realization: _the Mangekyou._

(sasuke what the hell have you done?)

You do not prod into another family's business. If people did, Neji probably would not wear a seal on his forehead.

Hours later, when Itachi is leaning forward, hands like white spiders on his knees, legs braced under his weight, head down and face flushed, Neji invites him to sit, and they watch the garden outside, seated on the tiny veranda lining the dojo in the bleak, misty sunlight.

"Your father," Neji offers after some quiet consideration. "Do you want to know?"

"I – yes," Itachi says again, and Neji feels the quick glance at his face like a touch, like a sting.

"I understand." He pauses, frames his thoughts in words. "I assume Sasuke thought you should not be told, and it would have caused much difficulty for the others who knew to inform you, which I suspect they were averse to in any case."

He keeps his head facing forward, notes Itachi's chakra flaring in uncertainty.

"You'll tell me, though," the boy says.

"Yes," Neji agrees. "You are named after him. Uchiha Itachi, greatest genius in all the long history of the Uchiha Clan."

The child physically startles, this time. "My – uncle? Sasuke's traitor brother? _The kin-slayer_?"

"Yes," Neji affirms, can't tell from the pulse of chakra through painfully fisted child's hands whether Itachi believes him.

(…what do i care whether he does?)

Itachi stares at his knees and wants Inku again.

He wants a lot of things he can't have.

xxxxxxxxxx


	41. The Weight of the World

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 41:**

"**The Weight of the World"**

Naruto has outrun any concept of time and distance, hot on the heels of Sasuke's cold trail.

Thought is rather more tenacious in its attempt to keep up with him, unfortunately.

_What the hell did they do to her?_

_Sakura's been abducted._

_I don't think it's wise or safe for you to rely so much on Kyuubi, Naruto._

_They were cutting her into pieces for fun._

_I'm sure we can trust Uchiha to reclaim her._

Trust Sasuke. And when it really matters he will, because gut instinct takes precedence over logical reasoning, but this is Sakura-chan, this is Sasuke, _these are my precious people, my absolute everything_.

He wouldn't have been so worried if it were anyone else taken; everyone else in his chosen family can take care of themselves, even little Itachi can play dirty and deceive, kill fast.

If _Hyuuga Hanabi_ can end up helpless and maimed on her back…

Sakura-chan helps people, that's what she does, what she _is_.

There was no one to help her.

His muscles scream, chakra burning through them, his heart is punching at his straining lungs and his mind is imploding, shattered redness and sharp panic.

He runs.

xxxxx

It is very strange, but she is not uncomfortable. Bound hand and foot, chained to a wall, she feels rather calm.

_She's a healer, huh? Well seize her then, we could use a medic!_

True enough, she has been forced to heal strangers until her chakra is so low she can't separate dream and reality anymore. Evidently establishing this outpost, this Rock Village colony closer to richer land, was tough work, given all the injuries she has had to treat.

The floor is stamped earth underneath her, wet soil clinging to her skin and clothes, a soothing chill against her bruises. Absently she is aware she should mind her side, be careful not to let grime infest the light wounds, but it's hard to move with restraints and exhaustion locked tightly around her body.

The Rock children overpowered them quickly, slung her over a boy's shoulder, left Ino in the dirt

_Ino_, Sakura thinks, closes her eyes. Unlike her abductors, Ino had no one there to tend her injuries, no one to beat until she complied and healed.

She is aware she needs to concentrate, plan some kind of escape. She needs to go home, bring tidings of this Rock outpost so comparatively close to Fire Country, needs to see her loved ones again.

_My loved ones._

And yes, that might be close to the center of things, part of the reason she relaxes here, and managed to smile at some of the little children she was to help.

No one in the world has hurt her as badly as Sasuke, and she's never loved anyone in quite the way she's loved him.

He loves me too, and he tried to strangle me.

And there's Ino, who made her what she is and broke it away from her.

Kakashi and Naruto, who tried and failed to be what they were supposed to.

Her parents, whom she failed, because she can't be normal, not as they think of it.

Her friends, whom she failed because she can't stop being normal, as they think of it.

She expects someone will come for her, is not certain whom. Kakashi perhaps, or Naruto if he hears about it. Probably Tsunade-sama will prefer to send a less qualified team.

She'll wait.

(as always, i'll wait)

She can do that. She has the practice, and she is so incredibly exhausted.

xxxxx

When Naruto reaches the camp he knows it is too late. There are screams and the smell of blood in the darkness, sounds of fighting and panic and fires.

He slinks in mostly unnoticed, realizes there should not be a village here, however primitive and miniature, and then realizes there isn't, anymore.

And if Sasuke has done this – if Sasuke has left this massacre – if _Sasuke _has committed a _massacre_ – then…!

Then there are no restraints and nothing to stop for and humanity can go to hell.

This is when his conspicuous glaring-orange clothing and blaring red-red chakra attract attention after all, and Naruto does not mind.

Grief would drive him to his knees, he'd cry his eyes blue and watery.

Now he's up and about, and there's nothing soft or wet or blue about him.

I wanted to become the Hokage when I was a kid, he remembers. He wanted it so he'd be recognized and cared for. Wanted it so he could be loved and keep his loved ones, keep them safe and clutched close.

A Hokage isn't supposed to lose his friendsisterlovedone_ohsopreciousperson_. Isn't supposed to have a monster inside him. Be a monster, in ways.

A Hokage is supposed to fight. Isn't supposed to need to fight himself.

The distant memory of the Forest of Death from the year Itachi was born is oddly tactile: _it's not okay, can't you see that, it's not okay to just kill people! It's not okay to treat others so casually, not to think of them as real people!_

Yes, he remembers how it was to feel like that. Misses it sometimes.

The world is a far away horror, is redness in the dark, fire and blood, and his heart's beating slowly in his throat, choking him, pounding painfully.

But later he is moving towards familiar chakra, takes a sloppy hit and falls through a wall, and there is – there is a moment of _freeze_, of the universe pausing, like a movie put on hold, and he can't breathe and he doesn't need to breathe.

In the outskirts of his vision there's Sasuke, a figure-formed focus of a storm of chakra, of _sakki_, throwing a very small person (_child_) out of his way with a move that leaves the person screaming and screaming.

Naruto barely notices, for the impossible too-good too-precious voice crying, "Sasuke!" And it's weak and scandalized and happy and horrified and it's hers.

"_No one takes you away from me_."

And Sasuke is across the room, and on his knees, cradling Sakura-chan against his chest with one arm and snapping her chains with the other.

And Naruto is distracted for an abstract second by someone else, some screaming man, and rips his head off ("_naruto!"_) and then he's stumbling forward, and his kneecaps too hit the floor, and Sakura-chan's heart is beating against his side, she's warm and alive, his nose in her hair and his tears on her skin, and relief sweeps him empty, leaves him boneless, thoughtless.

Sakura shakes and shakes, eyes closed and dry, her arms around Sasuke's thin neck, her face pressed into Sasuke's chest and Naruto's arms stretched around the both of them, and she sees men falling and hears _no one takes you away from me_ and wishes she could still believe in any kind of happy ending.

Incredibly, Sasuke's trembling too, and Naruto, they're sitting there like three scared fucking kids, shivering and teary, clinging to a dream they lost long ago. Team Seven was ripped apart before it was ever fully formed, but the echoes are strong now, soothing and searing.

Their assembly is broken up when Naruto abruptly pitches forward, a strange vulnerable sound issuing from his lips along with a terrible amount of blood.

Sakura screams and screams, Naruto lying over her lap and grunting; Sasuke whips around, bringing his hands up to block, kicking himself up and forward.

She is barely aware of his movements, the chakra and fury, the hits and the hatred.

Her thighs are wet with blood from Naruto's chest, and she does not need chakra to know wounds like that are inevitably fatal.

Another sound, grumpy and hurt, and she's cradling his upper body, and then he moves. Slowly, painfully, nudging her grip looser until he's up on his hands and knees, and reaches behind him. His face is oddly childish and dispassionate as he grunts, fisting a large trembling hand around the kunai lodged in the back of his chest, and pulls it out of his body with a slow wet sound.

"Ouch," he says. "Fucking hell."

There is a tear in his jacket and an awful lot of blood, but she can see no gash. Even when he moves again, to his feet, there is no indication of broken skin.

"_Kage Bunshin no Jutsu_!" He nods to the clones, which spread out in a half-circle. "Sasuke, you done with those guys? Good. Let's get the fuck out of here. Sakura-chan, can you walk? No? Alright, then. Here's my girl."

And he's grinning recklessly, and lifting her, and he stinks of blood and power and she's partly paralyzed from what she diagnoses as too little chakra, too much exhaustion and shock and _sakki_ – and he's wholly and hotly alive, and killing for me, oh god.

They both are, Sasuke shifting his face back towards them, ghastly white and violently red, and his expression is cold and calm. Irritated, not furious anymore.

"Get a move on."

Outside is – ohhellohgodohjesusfuckingchrist.

She's been told Naruto is a demon. She hasn't believed it.

She's thought Sasuke is mad. She hasn't seen it.

But what used to be a village is – something else, now. A battleground, a graveyard, something lost and broken and tainted. She cannot close her eyes but buries her face cowardly womb-safe in the folds of Naruto's jacket.

There are curses and shouting and techniques being named; there is the hissing of flames and the thuds of impact, flesh against flesh and flesh against ground, there are cries and pants and the steady beat of Naruto's heart, which should rightfully have stopped before letting him commit these atrocities.

_Demons, both of them, one from nature and one from nurture, the host of a monster and the carrier of the heathen curse_.

They've come for her.

I am the woman who was loved but not enough.

I am the woman who was adequate, average.

I am the woman for whose sake a war commenced.

Short eons later they are out on the moors, below the clear cold starlight, with soft breaths the only noise, and Naruto stops, and lets her down. She stumbles away from him in immediate, instinctive revulsion but can't seem to stand by herself, is caught between them: Naruto's hands on her waist, Sasuke's on her shoulders, and they're holding her up, holding her (_too_) close, crowded by their bodies.

"Careful," Sasuke mutters in the gruff, spiteful tone that means he's being sincerely concerned. His grip on her alters subtly until he's no longer just steadying but holding her, leaning her back against his chest, his arms loped loosely around her neck. His fingers and face and hair are soft against her skin, pressed into her.

"You alright, Sakura-chan?" Naruto asks, voice huskier than usual, somehow natural in this unfamiliarity. "Did they, did they hurt you?"

His hands are gentle, ginger on her sides, gradual touch mapping her solid, living reality through the ruined dress, the layers of physicality.

"No," she says. "Not really." She is surprised she is able to get the words out, almost flippant for all their breathy unsteady quality.

"Good," someone mutters; "thank god" Naruto continues at the same time Sasuke adds "they'd _better_ not have".

_No one takes you away from me._

Of course they have both been through much worse, have just _done_ incredibly worse to her abductors (because of me).

She hates them and she has never felt so loved. Never so safe or so scared. So scarred.

Sasuke kisses her then, and it's wet and slow and intense and nothing at all like that time in the hospital. This is real, and this is about us.

Disengaging, he leans forward over her shoulder, letting their cheeks brush, healing chakra ghosting his fingers up her side and over her face, and Naruto is very close in front of her.

_I will never love anyone in quite the same way I've loved you._

"I," he says. "Sakura-chan. I. Oh holy shit. I don't know what I'd have done."

"You," she starts, and there is so much up-beat tension, fairly vibrating between them. The fear. The trauma. The mind-blowing relief. The hopeless stupid endless love. She knows what they usually do post mission.

Wonders how she feels about that.

I am standing in the wilderness night pressed up between two men who are both hard.

I love them, and they love each other, and maybe me, and it all scares me (excites me, forbidden thought, but she's too tired to care).

Then it – doesn't frighten her, and when Naruto inches forward, adjusting his grip around her, she drapes herself bonelessly over Sasuke, her head resting on his shoulder, her mouth ajar in the very immediate vicinity of Naruto's. He stares wonder at her, and the whisker scars are stark in the pale light, and then his eyes are closed and his lips dry and chipped and kind on hers.

For the first time she understands why so many people jump each other when they've finished missions: the anchoring, the reassuring way to burn violence and stress out of one's system, to ascertain the living reality of your love.

This is my team.

The chosen family, the most desperately precious people.

They are infinitely gentle, Sasuke's hands cunning and sly on her sides and down her back, Naruto's fingers raw but experienced, ghosting her hips, her arms.

It is so weird, so far removed from any concept of reasonability, that she is not even anxious anymore. Perhaps she should study it, but the seal on Naruto's stomach is merely a blur, unimportant, a part of a body she has never seen unclothed before and finds fascinating now.

Sasuke, of course, is riveting. He looks older than he is, careworn, but he is beautiful and loved and so very wanted.

It is not the first time she has laid in the fields, but the stars paint their skin silver, and their touches are the center of the universe, briefly.

When she was twelve she wanted to give her virginity to Sasuke, and Naruto wanted hers, and while none of them are innocent anymore, maybe it is not too late for everything.

She rests reeling in the grass, watching the spinning heaven above, very close to both of them.

My teammates, my brothers, my friends, my precious people, my – lovers?

Yes, they are, both of them, by now.

Naruto makes a sleepy, contented sound and pushes himself up on his elbows, head thrown lazily back, eyes on the starry sky. Sasuke too inches upward, his breath warm against the forming goose-flesh on her shoulder.

"Cold?" he asks in that deep, rusty voice that sizzles through her.

"Hmm?" Naruto asks, tilting his face their way. "Oh, Sakura-chan, you're freezing! Why didn't you say?"

"It's fine," she replies, reluctant to disturb the peaceful quiet but realizing that she is indeed quite cold and sitting up slowly.

"Here," Sasuke says, and she turns from Naruto to see the Uchiha already back in his pants, handing her the dress.

"Thank you."

Naruto gives the rather beat-up garment a skeptical glance. "No way that's keeping you warm. Here, take my jacket."

"Thanks," she says again, feeling numb and stupid, pulling the dress over her head and the torn, ramen-smelling outer garment over it.

They walk through the rest of the night and the gradually dawning morning in companionable silence, broken occasionally by friendly jeers and jabs, soft laughter. For this little while we can be natural, safe and happy.

Then it is late morning, and there are running ninja in the distance, fast approaching, and anxiety is back, and grief and guilt is the world, in which you live with shame and disgust and horror shadowing your steps.

Naruto tenses, his shoulder protectively in front of her and his hands, clawed again she notices with a shudder (the hands that _touched_ me) go to his weapon's pouch. Sasuke's eyes are red (were dark just hours earlier above and beside and underneath and around her) and straining ahead.

"Easy," he says, raising a hand. "These are Sound ninja."

Soon enough Sakura can see this for herself, as a dozen strangers crowd them, heads briefly but deeply bowed in Sasuke's direction. She hasn't been to Sound more than she can help, but occasionally they too need healers for wounds that should rather not be moved, and she is as safe there as any Leaf kunoichi can be: it has been made evident she belongs to Sasuke, though there is a palpable lack of understanding regarding what it is that he wants her for.

"Orochimaru-sama," a slender brunette intones, dipping her head absently in Naruto's and Sakura's direction. "The Council decided to dispatch us. Is everything well?"

Sasuke nods a curt affirmative. "Yes."

He could have added: _we're on our hurried way back home._

Could have added: _we're at war with Rock._

The strangers fan out around them, some of them exchanging familiar greetings with Naruto, keeping their coveting attention on Sasuke. Sakura knows none of them, clings tenaciously to Naruto's side without looking at him, gulping down illogical sobs.

Through the day the strain grows heavier, lumps of stone lodged in her body, leaving her cold and distanthardfrozen.

At evenfall they make camp; a pointed look her way, at slumping shoulder and glazed eyes, and Sasuke called an abrupt, annoyed (worried) halt. As the others mill about, making sleeping arrangements and gathering wood and ingredients for a cooked dinner, she sits on a log, leaning forward over her legs, hugging herself. Her hair forms an inadequate drapery against the outside world as she chews her lip against the litanies wanting to spill forward.

She does not need to look at them to know where they are, roughly what they're doing, their approximate moods – _her boyfriends_, as Ino is fond of calling them. Her parents sometimes use that phrase as well, in a miserably failed attempt to normalize what lies dormant and dangerous between her and the rest of Team Seven.

…_left Ino in the dust._

And it is only now that that thought starts lashing her in earnest, and that, she is aware, is terrible in an entirely new way.

I've failed so many people.

Couldn't be the lovely laughing Haruno daughter, couldn't cut it as a kunoichi or teammate, botched relationships and repaired them crudely, haphazardly. Was too weak and worthless to defend Ino or herself, or to refuse Rock, or even try to save herself. People have died for her (guilt) and she lay on the moors with two men she has claimed she wants to distance herself from (shame, lie) and nothing ever ends, not in the happy way (hopeless).

Later (not fast enough) Naruto plops down beside her, slinging a warm, worried arm around her shoulders and drawing her frigid body close against his own.

"Sakura-chan? Hey, what's wrong? You alright?"

"I am," she says, trying her shaky hand at perfomative speech. "Before. Do you. Ino?"

Her eyes are large, she can feel that. Wide, painful. Wet, and she feels everything is draining away, being washed from the safe shores.

"No one said a word to me about Ino," Naruto admits, featuring a kind expression of worry that is mainly of the sympathetic kind. "I only just got back from the Hanabi deal when I heard about you and I, well, I just set off for the baby Rock village."

"Hanabi?" she inquires, because it is so vastly simpler than thinking about Ino.

"Yeah," and the little smile he tries is the epitome of grim, fades before it has fully formed. "I was sent out on this mission when I stumbled over a pretty damn grisly scene, and whoa, there are these two Akatsuki guys making jigsaw puzzles out of one of our teams. She, Hanabi, she was still alive, so I brought her back, only she – only she kinda doesn't have legs anymore."

"Oh." It's the only thing she can say, her mouth hanging stupidly open. "Oh god." I am going to be sick.

Two women, two fronts in a war.

She assumes Tsunade-sama could wash her hands off the conflict with Rock, if she wanted it enough, could claim Sasuke has acted as head of Sound, which is therefore the only village involved. Naruto could be given double citizenship with some trouble, and it could be said he's been involved in his capacity as a Sound ninja, not as a denizen of Leaf.

It would probably not work very well, or for very long.

_If only you hadn't come for me!_

(if only i had not felt so gratified about it)

"Hey, it's okay now," Naruto claims, with a trembling sort of conviction, both his arms around her (arms braced over her, achingly familiar hands sliding over her body, legs between hers).

_Left Ino with no one to help her up…!_

'It's not', she could have said, except Sasuke is here now, closed-off but close, balancing three mugs of something that thin trails of light smoke emerge from, offering them one each, black gaze lingering on her, on her face where there are no tearstains (which has been pressed against his naked body, felt his heart beat).

"Sakura," he says, and maybe it is okay, and _that's not okay_.

She goes to sleep between them wishing things made an acceptable kind of sense, that love mattered more and simplified life.

The next day is horrible, and the next.

Sasuke is clearly worried about her, lingering in her immediate vicinity, dark eyes resting heavily on her. Naruto forces himself into a cheerfulness that exists simply because the alternative, the reasons for the alternative, is unacceptable.

When at long length they reach Leaf her knees are faint, her lower lip bitten bloody.

"Ino's in the hospital, I believe," Sasuke says evenly, looking at her only out of the corner of a dark eye.

And her parents should be safe so it is to Ino she must rush. "Thanks," she breathes, and runs, unsteady and wild and fast as she hasn't since before ninja kindergarten. They both know not to follow her.

She wants to scream in frustration before she has the correct room number, but then she does and there she is, and – Ino's room is small and composed of boring white lines, symmetrical and sparse. Her mother is sleeping in a chair beside the bed.

Sakura presses a hand against her throat, a silly gesture to hide bruises and hickeys long healed, and manages to walk up to the bed, one hand steadying on the wall.

Ino looks pale and young, bandages wrapped around her stomach and left arm, visible through the white gown. She looks no worse than she did after Hanabi beat her up during the Chuunin Matches, but she has been in the hospital longer now than she had to stay then, and Sakura can't – can't think about that, nor truly about anything.

Her blood is boiling with shamefaced guilt over remembered desire.

"Ino," she says in a voice she does not recognize – harsh and gritty, suited better to Neo-Rock Village and what occurred there than to a hospital.

_What occurred in Neo-Rock Village. What they did to me. What was done for me._

I cannot run.

"Hmm," Ino mumbles, eyelids flicking. Sakura glimpses a thin blue-violet line beneath the lashes, and then Ino's eyes are open in an expression of astonished joy. "Sakura! You're here! You're alright?"

"Yes," she must say, feeling the words as something brittle in her mouth, sinking onto the bedside because it's the bed or the floor. "I wasn't hurt much. They just wanted me to heal. Sasuke and Naruto picked me up."

"I'm glad," Ino says simply, sitting up carefully and reaching for her hand. Sakura moves it away as inconspicuously as she can, looking at her knees. "Uchiha was way frantic. I was positive for a moment there that he'd snap my neck for letting anyone take you. It was – kind of touching."

"Ah," says Sakura, and doesn't look up.

"Hey," and Ino's leaning forward just a little bit, fingers curving loosely around Sakura's shoulder. "What's wrong? Did they snap in Rock and let you see horror movie stuff?"

Sakura says carefully, meeting Ino's gaze at last with a pained, disarming little smile, hating herself for being manipulative, for playing truth like a koto: "A lot of things happen that shouldn't have."

She disentangles before Ino can offer her anything she has no right to accept, mumbling something about how late it is, need so see my parents, take care, yeah?

"I will," Ino says. "And, Sakura – I'm really so glad."

Sakura can't look at her as she forces a smile. She going to have to claim her parents are desperately anxious, take the excuse to move back in with them for a while. The sunny two-room apartment two streets from the flower shop is closed to her, unbearably, how can she sleep in the bed she shares with Ino when two men's seed has filled her very willing womb?

When blood from the innocent and guilty alike has been spilled for my sake?

xxxxxxxxxx


	42. Emptied Words

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 42:**

"**Emptied Words"**

"Where's Itachi?" Sasuke asks her, and Tsunade studies him. He always looks sickly pallid and worn thin, but there's a happy cast to his features. Good thing, she supposes, that he clearly realizes and does not raise objection to how his son could not have remained with the appointed guardian.

"When called in for a mission, Lee decided to leave him with the Hyuuga. The arrangement seemed to work out well, so I left it at that."

"The Hyuuga?" Sasuke's expression is decidedly less pleased. "I'll be getting him." He walks briskly but not rushed; she is reluctantly relived he's kept his temper. In the doorway he pauses, turns halfway around to give her a vaguely inquiring glance. "Speaking of the Hyuuga, how's Hanabi?"

Naruto must have told him, then. No surprise, though she can't claim she likes it. "Better," she says with a shrug, opening the drawer with the sake. "Conscious, although gravely maimed. We're at war on several fronts now, if what you've told me about Rock holds true."

"Ah," Sasuke replies, not bothering to reply to her insinuations about his lack of trustworthiness. "A presumably at least partially re-formed Akatsuki, and Rock – Mist as well, I suppose. What is the situation in Sand, now?"

"Civil war," she discloses curtly, wanting to rub at her face. "We have confused reports of enormous civilian bloodshed and ruthless ambushes most every week. I've decided it's best to stay well out of it until the conflict is resolved."

"You ought to have shared the information with the Council," Sasuke says, tonelessly, without aggression.

She shrugs again, repeats the proverb: "What you don't know can't hurt you. Besides, it limits the possibilities for people taking reckless action."

He gives her a humorless smirk. "I'm not planning on telling Naruto, if that's what you're asking."

Of course he won't. Sasuke would probably consider it for the best if Sand slaughtered itself into shattered remnants of what was once a proud and brilliant ninja village.

"What am I keeping from him regarding Gaara?"

She's used to his insinuations: _Of course, if you don't tell me I might let something slip_…

She bristles, doesn't let it show. "He's snapped. Either he'll kill himself, be killed, or become dictator."

Sasuke nods, a distant kind of amused interest showing at the edge of his mouth. She remembers the expression vividly, from when she was young and did not yet think of it as sinister.

(i want to be drunk)

(i want to be innocent again)

(was i ever?)

She does not watch his back as he leaves, the glaringly red Uchiha crest in bright contrast to the drab black material of his shirt. He quit using the emblem for a while, but what with the various formal obligations he needs fulfill it works as easy identification, ostentatious display and warning.

He is out on the streets in a few minutes, less than that, and surprised to almost walk into the Hyuuga patriarch. A moment later he notices Hinata, the scared pastel presence half hidden behind the man. Are his eyes playing tricks on him or is her kimono bulging over the evidence of another and rather advanced pregnancy?

Without the usual ironical scorn he politely inclines his head. "Hyuuga-san. My condolences regarding your daughter."

The man nods curtly, age plainly evident in the ditch-like lines in his face – almost enough to make Sasuke self-conscious about the developing wrinkles around his own eyes, modest though those might yet be. Bloody silly reaction. Bloody inevitable.

Hinata lingers behind as her father hurries onward, presumably set on visiting his youngest (favorite) child, her fingers playing uncomfortably with the kimono sleeves.

"I," she starts, soft and stuttering and looking bashfully at his chin. "I am not sure when I'll be able to see Naruto, but I wanted to tell him – tell him thanks, and how much it means that he saved her, after all. Could you let him know?"

"Certainly," Sasuke replies, lifting a coldly amused eyebrow. _Still in love with him, huh?_

"Thank you," she says. "Itachi-kun is still at our house, Neji-san is minding him. I'm sure he will be delighted you are home."

"Ah," he says, and she gives him a fast, sad glance before hurrying after her father.

No one stops him entering the Hyuuga stronghold; the guards are plainly there mostly for show, if this is any indication. He's been here a few times before, forced to hold council with Neji by the Sound situation, localizes the fastest way to the building he knows the Hyuuga Heir Apparent inhabits.

A servant girl scrambles to open the front door for him, sliding it sideways and kneeling elegantly. "Uchiha-sama," she mumbles, gaze trained firmly on his feet.

"I'm here to pick up my son. Where might I find him?"

"I believe he is training with Neji-sama in the Left Dojo, Uchiha-sama. Shall I accompany you?"

"I'll find it on my own," he dismisses, hurrying away caught between curiosity, alarm and something quite else and unidentifiable.

The sliding door opens easily and he enters briskly, taking in the scene: Itachi backing and ducking in frantic rhythm, normally slick hair a wild halo around his head, Neji following with a sedate kind of measured haste, clearly careful to hold back just enough.

Itachi, he discovers and assimilates, is looking rather pleased. He isn't smiling, but then Itachi is not a smiling kind of person, and the little face is intent and glowing.

Neji finishes the assault before straightening, directing an expression of surprised acknowledgement at Itachi, who does smile now, a small, shy expression, like he's afraid someone's going to reach out and steal it from him if he lets it linger.

"Well done," Neji says, then directs his attention to Sasuke without turning, his voice inflectionless, passive-aggressive. "Uchiha."

"Sasuke!" Itachi does turn, so fast he almost stumbles, glowing anxiously at him. "You're back."

Sasuke nods, greeting for Neji and affirmation for Itachi, tries his hand at a little bit of a softening expression. Doesn't think he succeeds.

"How did the endeavor play out?" Neji asks evenly, facing him at last. "I understand you set out to rescue Sakura."

"I did," Sasuke agrees. "She's home. Sound's at war with Rock. Apparently they've been trying to expand, but Naruto and I crushed the settlement rather comprehensibly."

Neji lifts an eyebrow while Itachi's eyes grow large and he sucks in his lower lip, trying to stay inconspicuous and absorb everything, understand.

"That was unexpected," the Hyuuga allows. "How did Tsunade-sama take the news?"

Sasuke shrugs. "As you'd expect. The situation is what it is, and war we had already, what with Hanabi." He pauses, reluctantly recognizing he has responsibilities and thus adding, "My condolences. It's a considerable loss."

Damn useful girl, and easy enough to interact with. Pity, but there's nothing to be done about it.

Neji stares moderated hatred at him. "If you'll excuse me," he says. "There are certain matters which require my attention."

"I see," Sasuke says. "Itachi." The boy bows hastily in Neji's directing before scurrying over. It's distasteful, but he supposes he has to: "Thank you for looking after him."

"Think nothing of it," Neji says, with less sarcasm than Sasuke had anticipated. Slowly, considering, the Hyuuga turns to Itachi, surprising all present by stating, "You're welcome to visit again, provided your parent allows it."

"Thank you," Itachi beams.

On the way home Sasuke… admits? Establishes? …that, "He was right. You did well."

Itachi strives to school his face into appropriate controlled lines, feels the joy permeate his entire body.

"With styles like Neji's," Sasuke goes on smoothly, casually, as though this was the most obvious thing in the world and not sentences Itachi hangs on to every word of, "you need a long-distance distraction that occupies him while you get below his guard. There is no such thing as an absolute defense, but his comes close enough that taijutsu alone is a fool's game."

Itachi nods avidly. Certainly it makes sense.

He says, and it's a try for further conversation, not an argument, "I heard Naruto defeated him once, forcefully…?"

"Naruto is not only completely inept at genjutsu, he's also at liberty not to worry about being injured," Sasuke replies. "You are the Uchiha prodigy and sole heir."

"I – of course."

_You did well. Prodigy. Sole heir._

Inku died to make me a genius.

He did not mean to let them but the words spill forward in a clumsy rush, only partially allowing themselves to be restrained. "Ah, I – heard about. I was told that my, my father was – that he is a, a certain individual."

Sasuke looks chill and detached and does not actually hesitate at all. "Uchiha Itachi," he says. "Is that what you were told?"

"Yes." It's a whisper, a weak hiss. When it has become apparent Sasuke is not planning to volunteer more, he must add, "Is it true?"

"Yes."

"But – I thought you hated him. That he was mad, a monster." Bewilderment is in him, stark and sharp.

"I did," Sasuke replies levelly, tartly. "Was there anything else you wanted to know?"

"Not if I shouldn't," Itachi assures hastily. "I mean, if you don't want…" His mind is awash.

"Itachi was too good," Sasuke says unexpectedly. "It warped him. Made him something more than human, and to compensate he had to become less. He bought the Mangekyou with his best friend's blood." He sits down, legs crossed, tense and deceptively smallish in the thick yellowish grass. Itachi too crouches, arms around his knees, heart in his throat and pounding.

"After Massacre Night," Sasuke continues, without expression save for a certain hard kind of what might be wistfulness, "things changed for me. But they'd already changed for him. He did it to see if he could, allegedly. I think he did it because he felt he had to. Spared me for the same reason. Because he couldn't do else but to see if he was able, measure himself, but he had to have something left to act as a contrast, something to be measured against, and I was – I think I was the closest he had to family."

Itachi has heard the stories of course, but never the thoughts behind them.

"After, when the merging jutsu was complete and I left Sound, I knew I couldn't put it up anymore, fulfilling the oath. So I found him, and I needed him close and distracted, and I needed an heir, a future for everyone in the past that he'd taken away."

No expression in his face, gallows humor in his tone. Strain.

"My brother used to like me. Carried me, pushed me around. Put me to bed, poked me, let me sit in his lap and wrestle with him. I'd learned in Sound what men with power do with that sort of emotion. Figured he'd sleep with me, if I set up the circumstances right, gave him the idea. I was right, and then I killed him, and I had the Mangekyou and nothing left of my family, and a new one, inside me." (he's not talking to itachi anymore)

He looks away, breaking the intense stare directed at something behind Itachi (inward), distracted and sardonic. "Fuck Neji anyway. It isn't anyone's business."

"I'm – his son?" And he knows full well there should not be a question mark at the end of that sentence but cannot help it.

"No you're not," Sasuke snaps, returned to the present. "You're mine."

"Your heir," Itachi fills in.

"My child," Sasuke says, in a tone that invites no argument. Itachi realizes he must still be shaken up about the Sakura-san business, watches with something like apprehension how the wiry frame shifts uncomfortably, tensely. Sasuke gets to his feet with one of those lithe inimitable movements stretched out into a series of clumsy jerks. He's pale and looks drawn and a little sick, like he's saying something horrible, something shameful and hateful and hurtful that should never have been uttered, "I do love you, you know."

He is entirely unprepared for Itachi's sudden, tentative touch, the rough fingertips on his body, the raw, hurt, hungry look on the child's face. Itachi rarely ever touches anyone, has never accepted Naruto's hugs or scuffs with anything other than exceptionally ill grace.

Sasuke pushes him around often enough during training, occasionally rests a reminding hand on his head or shoulder, and – Itachi knows neither one is tactile, and it's embarrassing and strange and potentially painful and – _wonderful_. He can count the number of times Sasuke has held him on his fingers.

I don't know what to say.

Sasuke reaches down then, the little bit that's necessary, surprisingly little since he manages to appear taller than he is by force of his angry stare, strokes a hand over Itachi's face, lingering minutely over his forehead, tickled by his bangs.

Itachi is too fucked up to answer in kind, to consciously admit he wants to. He does realize he's strange in the head. Remains very dubious that that's a bad thing.

Doesn't know anything else.

"Uchiha!" a familiar voice rings out, and Sasuke recognizes the chakra, tilts his head in the correct direction, hand falling slowly from Itachi's face.

"Ibiki," he replies, and Itachi too eventually retracts his touch, staring blankly at the impressive, rather elderly man; preoccupied, desperately so. "I presume something is the matter?"

"Some Sound punks have been beating Leaf Genin rather badly," Ibiki says with tired disgust. "The Leaf teachers want blood, it's all progressing towards a very messy situation." He sobers, a hint of something pleased teasing the corners of his eyes. "Besides, Tsunade-sama told me about your ordeal with Rock, and given Naruto's additional run-in with the Akatsuki, there's more than reason enough for a Council session. Sound's already impatient for it."

"Akatsuki?" Itachi repeats, startled into recklessness by the morning's events. "Hanabi-san?"

Sasuke nods, attempts a reassuring expression that fails rather badly in that it isn't very mild or caring but works excellently in that it assures you anyone who even thinks of touching you will die. "Yes," he says. "You don't need to worry about them. Naruto killed those he found." He adds, dryly, "Most of us have a record of doing that, when we happen upon them."

Itachi mentally recites the numbers. Sasuke killed his brother and the fish-hybrid many years ago. Naruto took down two others on a mission that ended with Kakashi-sensei disastrously hurt (he's not supposed to know much about it, but kakashi-sensei talks when he's drunk and naruto when he's upset, after bad dreams and arguments). Kakashi-sensei killed one during the attack that heralded Itachi's birth, and Naruto and Jiraiya-sama another. Two more down now, again by Naruto's hand.

They must have recruited again, or there would only be one of them left, and that'd be too easy to be real.

"You'll be fine going home by yourself?" Sasuke says, and most people probably would not realize it is a question.

"Of course."

Sasuke nods, looking briefly conflicted. "I reckon Naruto's home. Don't let him give you ramen for dinner. Don't fight with him. Not even playfully. Kyuubi's too free after the mess with Sakura." And his voice is still a little hoarse when he says her name, and Itachi agrees obediently. He isn't lying about his cooperation, either. Fight a demon host who's killed four Akatsuki single-handedly and has only just escaped losing someone he loves? No, thanks. Itachi may be arrogant, but he is not stupid.

xxxxx

"I'm glad to have you back," Tsunade-sama told her, and Sakura nodded modestly, politely. It has become clear to her it was not on the Hokage's initiative that she had been rescued.

_Which makes me even guiltier_.

It was an arbitrary, personal decision that led to the slaughter and the grief and the war. Nothing solid or justifiable, nothing reasonable.

She could not bear her parents' tear-dripping relief, the smothering hugs that made her want to break down and cry, or the continued insistence she should give up this dangerous work, think of everyone who loves you if not of yourself, get married, have a family, we'd like some grandchildren, and that handsome young man who saved you seemed rather fond of you, don't you think? He has a wild edge, certainly, but surely family could temper that.

"He has a family," she said. "A son, at least."

"Oh," her mother had momentarily faltered. "But can't that be a good thing? Shows he's responsible, can take care of children. And it's such a precious, polite little boy."

Sasuke can't take care of anyone, she didn't say. Because he does, in ways that fail, but still he does.

I don't love him like that, she didn't say. Because she did for years and she loves him still and she will always love him and she lay with him in the fields at night.

He has a boyfriend, she didn't say. Because that didn't stop any one of them.

I live with Ino who is my girlfriend, she didn't say. Because she shares a bed with Ino and they're good together and have been close friends since Sakura became the person she is, but she doesn't deserve to be certain about any of that anymore.

I can't quit, she didn't say. Because for a moment she wanted to.

She said, "I'll think about it. I need some air." Went to the hospital to report in for work, had a talk with Tsunade-sama.

Is standing now paralyzed outside Ino's room, transfixed by the need to run and to not be the sick coward she feels like. Bear your shame with pride?

She feels every inch the fallen woman, her fingers gracing the door handle, and she has the crazy idea she might confess after all, even though she knows the new doctrine ruling her existence has to be: _Ino must never know._ It is the least Sakura can do, sparing her friend this pain. She owes her far more than that, after inviting the possibility Ino might know herself betrayed.

It'd be the second time they broke up over Sasuke.

Save the first time had significantly less to do with him, him as a person or anything he'd done.

Her paralyzation fades when she discovers, through the frosted glass cutting a square in the door, that there is someone in the room with Ino, someone who's rubbing the back of his blond head.

She hisses with fury, with blind panic, rattles the handle several times before it agrees to turn, spilling her into the room.

"…worried about Sakura-chan," she hears Naruto says, "she was really down when we got home, I wanted to check she was doing better."

They both turn to her, and she can only stare. Naruto's face is open and offering a dim, hesitant smile. Ino is tilting her head to the side in obvious consideration.

"I am," Sakura forces out. "Doing better. We need to talk. Now."

Naruto follows her rather helplessly out the door, where she slumps against the wall, pressing her palms flat and hard against it because otherwise she will start hitting him, or tearing her hair, or something equally terrible and ridiculous.

"You can't do that," she hisses. "Just marching in here – to _Ino_! Have you no shame?"

"I'm not–" He rubs at his neck again, blue eyes going thoughtful. "Look, I didn't think about it like that. I was just worried, I wanted to see you, figured you'd be here. Not like I have the possibility or the inclination to avoid Ino for good and ever anyway."

"That," she says, and her voice can't seem to rise above a whisper and is so bitter and hurt she's almost shocked. "_We_ should never have happened!"

"I'm sorry," he offers, bewildered but clearly sincere, growing anxious. "Sakura-chan, I–"

She shakes her head roughly, putting a hand over his mouth before hastily snatching it away. "Why?" she challenges, shoulders slumping. "I was a consenting adult."

"Then why are you…?" He makes a strange, comprehensible gesture with his hand.

"I care for her," Sakura says. "I had no right. Jesus, Naruto, how did you feel when Sasuke slept around behind your back?"

"Terrible," Naruto says. "Of course it was. But it's in the past, some things happen, maybe some things have to happen, and you go on through the jealousy and hurt and sadness. We all worked out, we're fine together now, all of us."

She can't stand looking at him anymore. "But what did you do before that? I'm sorry, really, but I'm not planning on having Ino beat me to hell, leave us both in broken pieces. Not everyone can stay together after that."

"Okay," Naruto says in a low voice. "Yeah, it's your precious person. I'm not gonna tell her, and if you mention it to Sasuke I'm sure he'll keep quiet. I'm just… I think there's got to be a better way to fix things, fit people together."

_Oh god_, she thinks. _I can't talk to Sasuke._

Because Naruto is her friend, is something like her best friend in the world, her closest family. Sleeping with him was about comfort and warmth and acceptance on all the intimate levels, never passion. Could never be romance between them, and she isn't spontaneously attracted to him.

She spent nine years wishing for Sasuke to sweep her off her feet, and finally when she'd convinced herself and everyone else that that childish desire had ceased, he did.

Naruto is a very accepting person. He'd have to be, having been scorned for more than half his life. Going out with a man who's lied and betrayed and hurt, prostituted himself and cheated and born his brother's child. Living with Sasuke and the child, working well enough with Kakashi, whom she thinks he has grown to love again, the way people do when they only have each other. Having done things himself, to Sasuke, that should not be forgivable either.

Clearly he's alright enough with sharing what they shared, he and she and Sasuke.

Ino's situation is quite different. So's her own.

"I," she says tiredly, defeated. _What does it matter? I've stared a _war. "I guess we'll try."

"We'll succeed," Naruto tells her with obstinate kindness. "Hey, just. I haven't any regrets, I love you and – don't try and cut me off?"

"I won't," she finds herself saying, even though that is exactly what she had planned. Her voice is terribly brittle, her throat terribly thick, choked. "I love you too. _That_ can never happen again."

"Alright," he says easily. "Of course, if that's what you want."

It wasn't about the sex itself for him either, she has thusly confirmed. Well, good.

"Um," he adds, breaking the heavy silence. "So, yeah, I was looking for someone else too. Hanabi. You know, I, I figured I'd see how she was doing, tell her to get better."

And she absolutely can't face Ino, and if she does nothing she will think of Sasuke, which is worse, so she says, "This way. We'll see if they let us through to her."

It is not visiting hours, but Sakura is a medic nin with the right connections and Naruto is the one who saved Hanabi's life. The guard steps aside after a brief moment of doubt.

Unlike Ino's this room is large, with generous windows and a hellishly telltale amount of machinery. Hanabi is lying stiffly on her back, so pale that both her skin and hair are nearly indistinguishable from the sheets. No marks of abuse are visible, but then you can only see her face.

She does not speak.

Her father was here, cried and cursed at the sight of her ruined legs.

Hinata spoke mildly, forced soft, unbearable touches to her face.

Neji-san looked at her calmly, with a warm kind of pain.

The Hokage and her assistants worked over her for a long time. She had assumed they'd want a report, but they were surprised when she spoke.

"Forgive my failure," she said. "It will not happen again."

Eventually they all left her, alone with what happened on the border.

"H-hello," Sakura says.

Naruto flashes a failed replica of his unquenchable grin. "Yo! So, um, are you – how're you feeling?"

She reaches for words past the distance of horror, forms the meaningless noises.

"I'm alive."

"Yeah," Naruto agrees, while Sakura stands speechless. "Yeah. That's – good."

Hanabi does not reply.

_Her Genin team slaughtered_, Sakura recalls. _Tortured in almost every way imaginable by two Akatsuki for most of a day._

My own terror seems silly, shallow and selfish.

Then Hanabi's blank eyes are turned to her, and she trembles under it from shame. The girl's voice is toneless and scratchy as she says, "I require legs. Is that possible?"

Naruto too turns to look at her, and Sakura swallows. "That would, would depend. I'm not an expert, and I haven't seen – what there is to, to work with."

"Go ahead," says Hanabi, and Sakura can't bear to let anyone else down because of her own cowardice. Preparing to lie, she forces herself to step forward and lift the blanket covering the Leaf princess' body. Stares at the uneven stumps of her legs, the messy way the ends have been burned close.

She can't lie to this. "It'd be," she says, reeling with horror, "very difficult to do anything. Normal legs are out of the question, I'm afraid."

"What isn't?" Hanabi demands, with the weakest sheen of temper lacing her words for the first time.

"I," Sakura says helplessly, "assume some kind of prosthesis would be in order. It would be painful to fasten it, and I'm sad to say it would not much resemble actual legs–"

"How it looks is of no consequence," Hanabi interjects tonelessly. "I need to move."

"It'll be good for that, at least," Sakura says, with a numb attempt at a fake smile.

Hanabi nods, her eyes going blank again.

It occurs to Sakura that the girl has not thanked Naruto for saving her and furthermore clearly has no intention of doing so.

xxxxxxxxxx


	43. The Other Woman

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 43:**

"**The Other Woman"**

Naruto returns home in a rather disquiet mood. Neither of his bedside visits to the hospital was particularly uplifting.

Hanabi wrong in the head though not too badly, more cut-off and bitterly passive-aggressive than Neji was all those years ago. Worst is how his attempts to cheer her up fell so utterly flat; how this was mainly because he couldn't believe in them himself: sure you can move on from being crippled, sure you can move on from sick violations, but your Genin team is your family, your most precious people, and that's the one thing you can't lose.

Why should she thank him for saving a life she probably doesn't want anymore? Revenge can't provide motivation either, since he stole that himself. Which is good because he knows better than anyone what vengeance did to Sasuke, but bad because the avenger stint did see Sasuke through alive and kicking, viciously.

"I'm worried about Sakura-chan," he tells Sasuke, dropping a kiss on the dark head and dancing away before Sasuke can de-gut him for it.

"How so?" Calm, carefully expressionless, Sasuke puts his chopsticks down and raises an eyebrow at him.

"Yeah, well," Naruto says, poking at his food with distracted distaste before digging in. Itachi makes a discreet face at his lack of manners, but that's nothing new. "She was all upset and guilty."

Sasuke looks a touch startled, then merely displeased. "Ino?"

"I guess, partly, but I got the feeling there was something larger at work too."

A scowl steals over Sasuke's features. "What else could she have done?"

"I don't know," Naruto sighs. "But she was – was almost disgusted with me. I don't know if because of the massacre or," he cuts himself off, blushes in Itachi's direction, "…the other thing."

"The other thing?" Itachi asks, sounding curious and only a little alarmed, and Naruto thinks, that's weird, the kid doesn't usually speak up to question, prefering to pretend he knows what he doesn't until someone lets it slip (or sometimes he asks kakashi).

"Adult business," Naruto claims, at the same time Sasuke says dispassionately, "We slept with her."

Itachi and Naruto are both staring at him in upset surprise. Naruto forces his outrage to stay quiet because cursing in front of Itachi is on the list of Child-Inappropriate Behavior along with fighting, making out and bringing up certain sensitive subjects. Like, for example, that of Sakura-chan and what they did with her.

"So," Itachi says with careful intonation, "is she going to… become part of the family?"

"I doubt it," Naruto says. "At least now she doesn't want to."

"Alright," Itachi nods, and Naruto thinks he might probably be relived. Sakura-chan's parents always dote on him, and she can't relate to a fucked-up adult in a body of a just-shy-of-four-years-old.

"I heard you stayed with the Hyuuga," Naruto says brightly. "How was it? Neji still got a stick up an uncomfortable place?"

Sasuke gives him a look that tells him not to offer up such tempting opportunity for dirty disparaging comments in front of Itachi. He grins back.

"Neji-san was very kind to me," Itachi replies, either not catching on or, more likely, pretending not to.

"Isn't his son about your age?"

"Yes," Sasuke interjects. "And they have another on the way."

"They do? Yeah, I think I heard something about that…"

"How was Hanabi?"

"Bad, but – hey, how d'you know I visited?"

Sasuke gives him a very condescending look. "I do know you, Naruto."

"Yeah, well. Anyway, she's… pretty damn broken apart. They're going to have to make her some kind of fake legs, after she's rested up, and they figure she'll need to stay in bed for a few weeks at least. Those were, you know, her Genin team, that died."

"I'm aware of that," Sasuke says distantly, and Itachi studies them both, the little signs of strain, the admittance that this is somehow a graver tragedy than the everyday ones. Of course, Itachi's never had a Genin team, is not likely to be assigned to one.

xxxxx

Not much later he is put on a temporary team for the toughest mission he's been allowed, an easy B-rank with two other Genin and a Chuunin, all of them supervised by Ibiki-sensei.

Itachi is aware Sasuke would not allow him to go anywhere there is real, imminent danger of the lethal variety without an overseer whose competence he trusts.

It isn't bad, really. He's over Inku, mostly, and has words to cling to (_you did well, my child, i do love you_). The other Genin are pathetic, but the Chuunin seems fairly competent, and Ibiki-sensei is in a league of his own. Has been for more than thirty years now.

He kills for the first time (stray animals and inku disregarded) and Ibiki-sensei's hand lands heavy and warm on his shoulder afterwards, when he's wiping the blood off a kunai on his pants leg.

"You're strong," Ibiki-sensei says. "Don't let it consume you."

Later, much later when they are home, Ibiki tells Sasuke to contain the disaster before it happens.

"The hell?" Sasuke asks.

Ibiki says, "Talk to Itachi. Kid's killing like an ANBU already."

Not brilliantly, but cold and efficient, with a hollow lack of caring.

(itachi-niisan sometimes returned home with blood on his clothes. it was never his. these nights he did not play with sasuke but always came in to say goodnight, touch his face. he did not always leave again)

When he can finally go home that evening he knocks on Itachi's door.

"Yes?"

He's awake, then. Actually, as becomes obvious a moment later, he is sitting up in bed, changed into his pajama, arms around his knees and a vulnerable, thoughtful cast to his face in the dark.

"Ibiki said you were back," Sasuke remarks, shutting the door behind him and crouching easily on the floor next to the bed. "You're alright?"

And through some strange magic the words leave Itachi calm and collected, like he could not imagine why he should not be alright.

"Yes," he says, and he does not sound uncertain. "It wasn't a big deal."

Sasuke blinks, allows himself that brief respite. He has a thousand things he must do, see to, mind, but it is unavoidably clear he needs to somehow make time for this, keep a _caring_ eye on Itachi before everything goes to hell, and if that means he has to make impossible schedules work and prioritize then that's that and he'll simply need to make it work. He has absolutely no time for Sakura, no matter how Naruto is still blathering with ever increasing anxiety about how their darling is looking steadily more under the weather. Even Kakashi mentioned her looking bad when Sasuke had the fortune to run into him for once. Maybe he should see about getting Kakashi onto the Sound Council so he could actually meet him more than twice a month…

Hell, he hardly has time for _Naruto_.

What you don't have, you make.

"Itachi," he says, making his voice as soft as he can. It ends up rough, almost husky. He presses a goodnight touch to the boy's face like he hasn't done for – ever.

"I'm trying," he mutters later, when Naruto raises questions about how Itachi is resembling certain people all too much, yeah that means you Sasuke, you need to do something about it, he's not five yet…

Naruto grins meanly, trying and failing to hide insecurities and lonely pain. "Try to succeed."

The blond continues to watch them, sees with relief and a brief sick touch of disgust that Sasuke's made himself a promise, which means he'll do whatever he must in order to achieve his goal.

Sasuke is all hard and angular and difficult, but jagged pieces can fit together too. Naruto knows that; so does Itachi, soon enough.

And Itachi is better, and Naruto wishes he could be absolutely sure it was more a matter of Sasuke letting down barriers than of Orochimaru being very good at manipulation.

(but, he reminds himself, itachi's getting better, so it's okay, that's what matters)

Yes, Itachi is better, marginally and in his own weird alien way.

Sakura very obviously isn't.

She is in Hanabi's room again, standing with her back against the wall, a tray of medical supplies in her hands and the taste of retches in her mouth. She's been feeling sick a lot lately, and has her doubts about this rather unconventional pseudo-surgery.

Hanabi seems to be the only one who's never hesitated. Her father has been worried, and Hinata, hell, even Neji, not to mention always-compassionate Naruto, though Sakura can't think about him, can't allow the guilty twitch that she's been the centerpiece of his anxiety ever since Rock, nor acknowledge why that is so.

Sasuke was here earlier, to brief Tsunade-sama on Kabuto's medical experiments, in case there was anything worthwhile to be gleaned. He and Hanabi looked at each other in perfect understanding, she could not help noticing; the cold killer's eyes, the bitter stubbornness. Sasuke would never have even considered remaining crippled either, regardless of the risks.

She is so grateful it is ridiculous that he did not do more than look at her, a long deep look, and if it had rested on me only a second longer I would have broken.

Now he's gone, there's only her and Hanabi and the medics, Tsunade-sama and Shizune-senpai and all the best ones, the experts. It's to be expected, for an experimental surgery on the Leaf princess.

Anko-san's allegedly waiting outside; they've been having Hanabi stay with her.

"It makes sense," she remembers Tsunade-sama saying, to Kakashi. "Anko was traumatized by an Akatsuki as a little girl too. We don't have anyone else. Hanabi can't go home, she panics when she sees her family, and Hinata at least falls to pieces, plus they have a young child and another on the way."

"I guess," Kakashi said, gently ironical and actually thoughtful. "I'll talk to her."

Sakura can see the legs now. They're made of the same material as Gaara's brother's dolls, mostly bone but with elements of stone and metal, fused by chakra. The stumps are a little longer than the cut-off pieces of her actual legs were (she's in her early teens, still growing, let's hope to heaven we've calculated this right because there won't be any changing these prosthesis) roughly two inches in diameter, of the hardest and most durable material known to man.

The feet, she was made to understand, and morbidly cannot stop pondering now, were the tricky part. Since Hanabi's knees were spared the legs need only be sticks, but real feet can bend and flex, curl their toes. These artificial ones are less unbreakable than the legs, looks like magnified doll-parts. Supposedly Hanabi will be able to manipulate them, move them by force of her chakra instead of through nerves and muscles.

She lies sleeping in the bed now and Sakura cannot tear her eyes away from the white, forcefully relaxed face, that too like a doll's, expressionless and bred into perfection, the ultimate Bloodline prodigy specimen (colorless hair looks incredibly weird on fifteen-year-olds).

Then Tsunade-sama is _glowing_ the prosthesis attached, the chakra so strong it becomes blinding. It runs across the inside of Sakura's eyelids like an aurora borealis.

xxxxx

That night she dreams, lying stiffly with her back turned to Ino. She's been extremely reserved and prone to sudden spasms of tears since Rock, and Ino hasn't pushed – _probably doesn't want to hear I was raped._

…which might have been simpler, and she is so ashamed of the thought she almost gags on it.

In the dream she in enveloped by Kyuubi's chakra, to the point it becomes the world, save it isn't red, it's the blue hue of Naruto's yet unmistakably it belongs to the demon, fiery and wild and immortal.

Sasuke is with her, his eyes the color of blood and a katana in his hands: I'm on my back, naked and helpless, and screams and screams as he cuts off my legs, and I've never loved or desired so desperately, and screams that too, screams through it.

Wakes up trembling, wet with her own sweat, saltiness on her lips.

_I've never felt this bad._ _Except when Sasuke left, and when I thought he was dead, and of how badly Naruto was hurt because of what he promised me..._

Not just an emotional kind of sickness, but a virulent physical illness, boiling in her stomach, and she's swallowing and spitting, trying to do both at the same time, moaning softly, keenly, as she struggles out of bed. She collapses on the way but gets back to her feet again, stumbles into the bathroom and empties herself utterly into the toilet.

She looks up, takes in the predictable sight of Ino in the doorway with slow horror.

"Hey," Ino says, trying and failing to be light, stepping in hesitantly to kneel beside her. "Maybe we should just install a bucket in the bedroom, the way you're going."

"Don't," Sakura asks dully, eyes on the mess in the toilet.

Ino's touch, light on her hair, is papery. Brittle. She says, "I kept hoping it was just PTSD. But you have all the symptoms." She swallows. "You're pregnant, aren't you?"

In a rare act of tactfulness Tsunade-sama has not said anything, and so Sakura has kept the words from forming, not thinking about morning sickness (it's just stress, just emotional panic translated into physical nausea) or hormone swings (just ptsd) or her waist thickening (okay, so i'm not eating much but i suppose never having the energy to cook means i must've been snacking) or how she's stopped bleeding (stress, just stress, it's never been all that regular anyway).

What are the chances, anyway? She only slept with them once.

("chakra permeates the entire body, and in people who have learned to consciously control this power, it is prone to have significant effects on physical functions. sub- or even unconscious wishes can be realized, by unintentional employment of chakra; the greater your control over it, the greater the possibility for this")

(_and you wanted to, didn't you, you wanted to be tied to them in a way that could not be made undone_)

"Don't," she says again. "Ino, please don't."

And something breaks.

"I'm _sorry_ I couldn't protect you," Ino says, and Sakura doesn't look at the tears in her eyes or the hands fisted at her sides. "I'm sorry I couldn't save you, but this…! You have to stop shutting everything out and getting more and more miserable!" She's breathing fast and hard, like she does when she knows the sensible option would be to give up, and that that isn't, after all, an option. "I'm sorry I can't be your hero and sweep you off your feet to safety and perfect happiness, but I'm here and I care, and can't that be enough? I don't know what those Rock bastards did to you, but whatever it is, you're better than that, you're stronger than this, and you won't be defeated by it! I won't let you be!"

"It wasn't like that!" Sakura screams. She's crying and hurting and she can't hold anything back anymore, slipping into panic and past it. "Rock didn't touch me! It was afterwards that I – I… it's true I don't know whose it is, but," and her voice goes subdued, muffled but mercilessly clear, "there are only two candidates."

She is far beyond shock when she finds herself abruptly in Ino's embrace, Ino's arms around her back and her face pressed into Ino's chest and Ino's voice close to her ear saying, "Oh thank god, oh thank god, oh Sakura, _thank god_."

"What?" she squeaks. Is this another nightmare?

Ino's voice goes harder, harsher, but it's still giddy with relief, a little insane. "I presume they didn't force you," she says with an attempt at dryness. "God, is that all there was? I thought – god, I thought those assholes had raped you."

"No," Sakura says, so low she can barely be heard. "No one forced me."

"But you're still miserable. Okay, look, yes, when it really hits home I am going to be hurt and furious that you did that behind my back, but it'll pass. You're my friend, you know? Hell, you've got to take comfort where you can, right?" She laughs, and it becomes a parody of the sound. Her grip is just hard enough to hurt. Proud, perfect Ino, reduced to forgiving an adulteress. "Here I thought Uchiha was only interested in boys."

"So did he," Sakura says, and the words are forced and far away. Banter, in a place like this? Preposterous, monstrous, ludicrous. "But Ino, that's not… They started a _war_ for me. You have no idea what they'd done to that village, some of the inhabitants were _children_, and people are going to d-die, and it's all because I was too weak and stupid to defend myself!"

"Get over yourself," Ino tells her. "The war was coming, whether you got kidnapped or not. Shut up feeling sorry for yourself about things you couldn't have done anything about and be damn happy they saved you instead. I am, you unfaithful bitch."

"Thank you," Sakura says, knowing she doesn't deserve "For everything."

"Go back to sleep," Ino says, releasing her after a last hasty squeeze and standing up. "I'll clean up here and curse you for a bit."

xxxxx

Ino's gone when she wakes up the next morning.

_I'll be mad as hell and choke on betrayal for a bit before I assimilate._

She didn't say, You let me down.

Ino isn't cruel, not truly, and there is seldom need for ostentation between them.

Sakura brushes her teeth and her hair, pulls the dress over her head and discovers it is getting very tight over her middle. She almost manages to be concerned that she is late for work.

Marginally brightening is the news that Hanabi's treatment has proven successful. According to the hospital rumor mill the insane heiress is already forcing herself to walk. She did fall before she'd managed more than two steps, blacking out from sheer pain, but then even miracles need work.

It is a miracle but not my miracle, and come lunchtime Sakura breaks and slips away; flees, though she is loathe to call it that.

Being surrounded by strangers is unbearable, and her steps lead her to the quiet, isolated Uchiha Compound, where no one goes without very definite reason (not even i).

Reasons like the one growing inside her.

(my parents will be pleased, at least)

And only then does it strike her that not once has she considered the option of abortion. Even now the thought makes her shudder worse than any idea of keeping the child. _Which is ridiculous, but…_

But she can't. Just can't, with the force of emotion that transcends all logic. Yes, I believe it's every woman's own decision, of course I do. But the whole point of that is that it's a choice, that there are two options... and it's just, it is the way it is, now.

Startled, she finds she is almost at the correct house; her legs do not want to carry her further but are incapable of stopping. She hangs onto the door, aware it is very improbable that anyone's home. Knocks, all the same.

Startles, badly, cold and perspiration paling her face, when there are steps inside.

Opening and looking up at her through dark bangs, Itachi nods politely in greeting. "Hello, Sakura-san."

The child she failed to help deliver; nauseous, she presses a hand to her stomach, hard, before she realizes she's the adult here and can force herself to calm down.

He's been so much better lately, calmer and more content, with that dangerous edge blunted, or at the very least turned away from the people he knows.

"Itachi-kun," she says helplessly. She's shaking faintly, still feels a little sick. "I was just…"

His eyes are chill and measuring, like she's an equation to be solved (a problem to be solved?). His words and the tone with which they are spoken are perfectly civil, however. "Do you need to sit down?"

Again, once again in this cursed reality of helplessness, she does not want to but cannot help it, sinks down on the topmost of the handful short stairs leading up to the front door.

"Don't worry," she asks, because his discomfort is clearly increasing.

"What do you want?" he demands; it comes out hostile, an order. His hands unfist; he looks fixedly at her chin. "I mean, I mean, can I help you?"

I saw you being born, she thinks. I offered to be your mother.

Perhaps that's what makes it break out, "You're going to have a sibling."

Surprise on him, but not – not half as much as she'd expected.

That – can hardly be. I am aware I am not adept at translating his sparse expressions.

"How do you feel about it?" She tries to be kindly, in control of the situation, but it comes out more of a plea.

"It's not my business having opinions on that," he says very neutrally.

It is very quiet. She hears birds in the distance, the beating of her own heart, his breathing close beside her.

"Sasuke's in Sound with the Council," he says, distant, almost absent. "I presume you have not yet informed him of this development?"

"No," she admits (and i'd forgotten he is not a child, and what would i have done with that? what if… what will i do with this?), "I haven't told either one of them."

Something passes through him that could be a startle or a shudder at what that sentence must imply – _either one of them._

She mirrors it.

He doesn't let it show that he's seen it, though he must have. "Naruto's away on some mission with Kiba-san and Chouji-san," he informs her tonelessly, with unexpected kindness. "He's expected back by evening." His throat moves, indicating a swallow, stillborn words. Then he startles her again: "Would you like me to accompany you to Sound?"

"No," slips out before she can stop it, panicked. "Thank you, but no. I need to be alone for a bit, I think."

The mildly inquiring, fundamentally unsurprised face, the relatively easy acceptance. He probably dislikes her.

"If you don't mind," he says, still with that careful neutrality, "I have an appointment…?"

"Of course." Smiling demands marginally lesser effort than she would have expected. "You go ahead."

He nods shortly, childishness breaking through his defensive façade for the first time; he doesn't bide her goodbye, just turns and walks very fast, jumping atop a roof halfway down the street.

Absurdly, sitting outside their home, she wants Kakashi. He is something like a parent to her in spite of everything, and he could've… he's made worse things alright with his presence.

But she knows whom she needs to see, walks slowly, inevitably, out of Leaf.

She has not been to Sound often, but she knows the way, and the knowledge of strangers watching her with constrained hostility is no worse then the worried concern and muted accusation she perceived in Leaf (paranoia, i know; cannot help).

"Excuse me," she says at last to a middle-aged male ninja reclining against a large, impressive building that strikes her as vaguely familiar. "I am looking for Uchiha Sasuke."

He makes an approximate gesture towards the building. "Council's in session."

Obviously he is at a loss: she is a Leaf kunoichi of no notable skill or station. She is also the person his master has started a war over.

She says, and tells herself she'll feel sick later that she's already using the situation for manipulation, "It's about his child."

Except maybe it isn't, and definitely not about Itachi.

The guard spits in the dust, his face a study in apprehension and doubt, but he dares not deny her (she's seen the sentences dealt out here, for improper behavior). "This way."

She follows him through dark corridors and to a small, elegantly concealed doorway. Through it, when he pushes it partially open, she glimpses the famed Sound Council – Sasuke's thin back to her at the head of a table, Neji a few seats down, and Ibiki-san, and another man with the Leaf crest whom she doesn't recognize and a few Sound denizens. An air of professionalism and importance hangs over the proceedings, unspoiled by the tired wrinkles in Ibiki-san's face and the tense slump to Sasuke's shoulders.

Suddenly her presence is ridiculous. What is she doing here, disturbing everyone for a careless woman's problem? Surely, she tells herself with what should be dryness but becomes hysteria, surely the unborn child will still be there tomorrow.

"Orochimaru-sama," the guard says uncertainly.

"For god's sake, what? How many times do I need to tell you, Naruto is not allowed here, I don't care how much he whines."

"Sasuke," escapes her mouth, and he's turning, the entire room's attention is on her, and suddenly he doesn't look irritated or tired, just concerned, wary. He makes a carry-on type gesture to the rest of them, is out of his seat and coming towards her, closing the door behind them and ordering the guard away without looking at him. The dark measuring eyes never leave her; and if I were Naruto I might have been able to read the look.

"Sasuke."

Words aren't easy, not with him.

Shaky breath, take the plunge, deep into the unknown water. She looks him in the eyes. "I'm having a child."

He looks – a lot like Itachi does, the few times Sasuke is kind to him. Cautious and overwhelmed, masking all of it to the best of his ability.

"I see." Except it is a question.

"Yes," she affirms, hoarsely but feeling better. It's us against the world, Team Seven. "I'm not – I don't know whose it is, but…" She bites her lip to stop herself babbling.

"That hardly matters. You're keeping it?" Careful matter-of-factness.

She nods, can't speak. This is not how she pictured it would be to create a family. It's not bad, though, not bad.

"Yes I am. Are you – do you…?"

He nods; forces a smile. Shrugs uncomfortably a moment later, shifty. He sometimes talks when he's unsure what to do, she remembers. Talks so people won't have opportunity to prod.

"Itachi's a good enough heir I don't need to bother trying for extras, but," and his hands are actually moving, fingertips rubbing against palms, "more Uchiha children would be – exceptionally valuable. And it's Itachi who hasn't wanted Naruto for a parent. Naruto, he's always wanted children, and I'm not planning to give him that."

He stops himself with a rueful, panicked look quickly masked. He's content, then. Naruto will be thrilled. Ino will – get over it, if the gods are good.

…What do I feel?

I don't even want a child, not now, not like this.

When has what she wants ever mattered, truly?

"Look, I," Sasuke says, looking like he wants to touch her but won't let himself. "The meeting is – unfortunately important. Naruto'll be home by tonight. We could talk then?"

"Yes," she says, weak with what could be relief. "Yes, absolutely."

When he nods and turns away she remembers; flushes, blurts: "I stopped by your place before coming here and – I panicked. Itachi knows."

She remembers when the boy was born, and she panicked as well, and Sasuke screamed. Closeness can take almost as many shapes as distance.

Once again he is a little startled, but not displeased. "Right," he says. "Should we come over?"

She nods, touched for some reason that he recalls she does not like the Compound at night, feels safer in the modern plastic pastels he cannot comprehend.

"Later, then," he says with what could have been a smirk or a smile or a grimace and retakes his seat.

"What did she want?" Neji asks.

"Nothing that concerns you. Now, about altering medical research legislation…"

"We will not conform to the narrow-minded fools in Leaf," sneers a pale medic nin, all gaunt cheeks and light stubble.

"Tsunade-sama–" Ibiki starts.

"Certainly she's brilliant," the medic nin interrupts. "I admire her work, honestly, but fact remains she could not have done much of it had she not had access to theories that were tried out the way we do things now. What does it matter if dead bodies are experimented upon? It obviously does not hurt them, surely they would be glad to do their comrades a last favor!"

"Don't claim credit for our Hokage's work! How dare you try and glorify your inhumanity!"

"Fact remains," Ami interjects. She's blond and sweet, a vicious fighter and spy extraordinaire. "It was Kabuto-senpai's research, built upon highly unethical grounds, that made the Hokage's latest feat possible."

"She'd have gotten there eventually!"

"Probably," the medic from earlier admits, the line of his mouth vicious, "but by the time she did it would've been too late. If Kabuto hadn't wrung three dozen people inside-out, Hyuuga Hanabi would have never walked again!"

Sasuke suppresses a sigh and a scowl, lifts a hand to quiet them. "Our current legislation stands firm on free use of the dead, on prisoners of war and on volunteers. Compromises can be reached regarding non-volunteer civilians of any nationality."

"You are well aware," Neji says calmly, "that Tsunade-sama will demand you cease any kidnapping for the purpose and that coercion on the matter be subject to capital punishment."

"I'm willing to outlaw the abductions," Sasuke says. Only too willing, with the memory of Kabuto and needles long ago ("if we could _make_ a sharingan…") "Capital punishment for repeated crimes only. Furthermore, if Leaf is expecting Sound to share the results, they are in turn expected to contribute in some manner. Funding would be acceptable, actual research preferred."

"Two offences, then death penalty," Ibiki offers, intent expression on his grim face.

(sakura's carrying our child)

"Done."

"I'll argue for it with Tsunade-sama, then," Ibiki concludes.

Neji nods agreement.

"Excellent. Any objections?"

No, of course there will not be. You don't get any seconds chances before you receive capital punishment for that one.

xxxxxxxxxx


	44. Coming Home to You

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 44:**

"**Coming Home to You"**

"Fuck," Naruto almost yells, kicking the door viciously closed. "Bloody fucking hell!"

Two pairs of red eyes pin him, pain him.

"Naruto?" Itachi's voice.

"Idiot?" Ah yes, I love you too, Sasuke dear.

"I just," he cuts himself off, closes his eyes and swallows, letting his hands curl into loose fists. "I did that B-rank with Kiba. It was his sister's kid the Akatsuki killed. They had – they had fun with him for _hours _before they let him die, just like with Hanabi."

Next second he's vaguely regretful; had he any disgust left, he'd direct it at himself, because Itachi does not need to hear this.

Sasuke sighs and remembers bright words in the dark dingy routine of too-easy power play. She never did fit in, did she?

"Get over it," he says. "You didn't even know them."

He realizes his mistake when Naruto whirls around and grabs the front of his shirt, but it might well be for the best, a fight to clear the air.

He tilts his head back arrogantly, placid and ready to break the grip.

"So what?" Naruto hisses furiously.

"So calm down," Sasuke tells him. "There's no point in you freaking out about it. There are other issues we do need to discuss."

"You…! Yes, alright." After a last shake Naruto lets him go with a sheepish fake-grin. "Sorry. Shouldn't have taken it out like this."

Not: shouldn't have taken it out on you.

_Shouldn't have done it in front of Itachi._

Sasuke shrugs his shirt back into place. Translation: doesn't matter, it'll take more than that to ruffle any of us.

Subtlety does not work with Naruto, and Sasuke has never been a great appreciator of it himself. He discloses it calmly, crisply: "Sakura sought me out. She's expecting."

"Expecting? Expecting what?" Inspiration strikes a moment later. "Holy shit! Look, Sasuke, if this is some kind of joke it's _not funny_."

Sasuke gives him an extremely elaborate look.

"I, Christ, _really_?"

"Really," Sasuke affirms. "She isn't sure who fathered it, for obvious reasons. We're visiting her tonight to talk things through."

(_sakura's having our child_)

Waiting to set out is pointless: trying to finish the stack of documents requiring his approval would be a futile quest with an impatient Naruto constantly bugging him in childish ways.

Naruto, who loves kids; so Sasuke told Sakura, so Sasuke is well aware, thus he is hardly surprised Naruto, who besides has worried himself if not sick then into a mild cold over their kunoichi teammate, can barely contain himself during the walk and limits his retaliation to a whack over the back of the blond head and a muttered insult.

The Yamanaka/Haruno residence is a two-room apartment on the second floor. Sakura is sitting curled up in a stuffed chair, chin on her knees, watching apprehensively as Ino cleans her mission gear at the kitchen table.

("i-ino. i didn't expect you home."

"no? yeah, well."

"i spoke to sasuke, earlier. he and naruto are coming over. if you – if you don't mind. i could go intercept them, we could talk at their place."

"don't bother."

"alright")

It is Ino who opens the door, face schooled into resigned dislike. Naruto's attempt to fight down his grin is only partially successful.

Ino removes her gear from the table under Sasuke's amused glance while Naruto stares at Sakura making her way slowly over to the gathering.

"Right then," Sasuke says at length in the voice that directs the Sound Council. "Let's proceed."

Naruto snorts at his wording but sits obediently, they all do, Sakura with Ino and Sasuke on either side of her and Naruto in front.

It's a solemn kind of family council; Ino grim but determined, Naruto still reeling with gleeful shock, Sasuke customarily impassive and Sakura still in bits about the entire business.

It is stumblingly established that yes, Sakura's pregnant, by either of her teammates, and yes, they are all in agreement she should keep it.

Then comes the inevitable question: how do we do this?

Ménage à quatre definitely is not an option.

They stutter through the question of living arrangements, Sakura explaining, being too discreet to glance at Ino but knowing whom she's addressing, "I don't want to cause any trouble. If that's what turns out to be simplest, I can always move back in with my parents for a while. They've been nagging me about grandchildren forever, they'd be thrilled."

"We're roommates," Ino interjects quietly. "And friends. Maybe not anything else or more, but that won't change. I'm perfectly willing to help out. I don't want you to feel you have to move, because you don't."

The smile at Ino, watery and blinding-bright, is unstoppable: she is surprised to find, for the first time, that it draws not the slightest ire from Sasuke.

Of course, he has little reason to be jealous anymore.

Something good might yet come of this, then, and if the child's going to have four more-or-less parents Sasuke and Ino are going to have to learn to get along…

"Speaking of parents," she remembers. "I should tell them. It's hardly fair they hear only after it's been disclosed to most everyone else."

"D'you want someone to come with you?" Naruto asks. "I mean…" He makes a comprehensive gesture, offering a disarming smile.

Yes, Naruto has always been family material, plays and protects and loves with that wild, barely-suppressed glee. Even Sasuke's gotten better, with Itachi.

"They'd probably appreciate that," she says. Actually, so would she.

Her parents have never taken her relationship with Ino seriously: time and again it's been, You're just friends, it's sweet you're so close but you'll grow away from that, find yourself a man and be part of a proper family…

Their opinions matter little enough it's hardly worth correcting them. Let them have their illusion, she'll have her life the way she wishes it.

"Well, there's not much of a question then, is there?" Naruto says, with the sort of pain-bright grin that was so usual in his childhood. "Mind your manners with the in-laws, Sasuke."

"Naruto, it doesn't have to be–"

He waves it off. "It's fine, it's fine. C'mon, it's more for their sake than anyone else's, right? I'd scare them to death, crazy demon orphan with no money or future. Give 'em what they want instead."

Sasuke gives him a level look. "You think they'd be happier with a traitor fresh off the pages of the Bingo Book who's living with his boyfriend and son? Her father hit on me when I was a girl."

"You might be on to something there," Naruto says, grateful and almost laughing. "Well, who can blame him? You were way pretty – too bad that part didn't keep…"

Sasuke just scoffs at him.

"Um, about that," Sakura explains, "I think all of that simply got too weird for them. They know next to nothing about the ninja world, have no idea about the Oiroke no Jutsu and almost none of the Uchiha tragedy. As far as they are concerned Sasuke's a young man with a brilliant record and a well-mannered son."

"Very well," Sasuke says. "I need to supervise a Councilor Match in the morning. Can I pick you up at noon?"

"Yes, sure. I'll be at the–"

"You'll be at home," Ino interrupts. "You won't be any help at work until you've slept out."

Naruto agrees enthusiastically and forcefully, and the matter is settled.

"Probably," Ino ventures, cautious and acrimonious, "it'd be best to let it be the general assumption that Sasuke's the father. I mean, we don't want lynch-mobs trying to kill demon spawn or anything. And, not to remind you of painful things, but you know you couldn't defend yourself if that happened."

"Yeah," Naruto says at once. "If it's Sasuke's, Leaf and Sound both will protect it. That's much better."

As it is obvious to anyone who knows them, which equals the majority of the gathering, that both Sasuke and Sakura are beat, it is not long before Naruto drags his Uchiha away with a chipper, "Bye-bye, Sakura-chan! Bye, Ino."

"Hey," Sasuke protests once they're outside. "You don't have to pull me."

Naruto makes a tsk-ing sound. "You're all but sleepwalking. I'm going to put you to bed."

"Oh, _really_?"

"Sure. Good practice for the baby."

Sasuke decides Naruto has deserved it. "You do realize Sakura is exceedingly unlikely to allow us putting sleeping jutsu on her child?"

"One more night with Itachi screaming and she'd have given in, I'm sure of it. Moral high ground's worth shit if you don't get enough sleep to appreciate it."

"Whatever, moron." He sobers. "I need to brief Itachi."

"Yeah, I guess you do."

Naruto obediently slinks into the bathroom when they get home, leaving the (only) two Uchiha in private.

"What did you decide?" Itachi asks, voice even, gaze as neutral as intent. He's too smart to have opinions on things he cannot change.

"As far as anyone outside the family circle is concerned, I am the child's father."

"Alright," Itachi says, collected and brittle. "Will they – where will they be staying?"

"Her apartment. It isn't – it's her and Ino's responsibility. You don't need to be concerned."

"Alright," Itachi says again, and sounds like he might actually be, this time.

"Good night," says Sasuke, starting for the longed-for bedroom. "Oh, right. When you see Kakashi, tell him I want him on the Council, no excuses. I need someone who can take over part of the bloody paperwork and administration."

A smile, achingly beautiful like it can only be on your children. "I will."

xxxxx

Ino watches Sakura the next morning, eyes hard and level on the pale sleeping face.

I do love you, she thinks. But you've always been a stupid little screw-up, always needed someone else to pick up the pieces for you.

That's alright, she supposes. Ino wouldn't want to live like that, in such straining dependence, but her friend's always been milder, a follower. Better suited as a mother than as a kunoichi.

Well. That's not Ino's decision.

Not Sakura's either anymore, it seems.

That's why Ino's never liked seeing Sakura interact with Team Seven – placed beside three men who have gone through life changing the world, what can Sakura ever be but a pushover? A normal person does not lead an extraordinary existence, doesn't force herself upon history.

Never mind. She's had time to run a few errands before Sakura wakes up. Pale green eyes fasten on her, and Ino stops putting away groceries, meets the look.

"Thank you," Sakura says in a low, raw voice. "For what you said. About getting over myself, about how I couldn't have been responsible. It helped."

"It's the truth."

"Maybe," Sakura says, standing by the window, playing with the hasp. "I was thinking, once, that Hanabi's situation was eerily similar, and I can't feel it's her fault. But she – you know, the first thing she said, the only thing she said that wasn't just cold info report, was, _Forgive my failure_."

She shakes her head but does not allow herself to turn her face away, showing the anxious set of her lips, the wide, no-longer-sleepy eyes. She swallows, her jaw tightening in determination.

"After that, though, she said, _It won't happen again_. And, you know, it won't. I won't let it. I'm going to do things better. I'll try."

There's a knock, of the quick, decisive kind Sasuke employs.

"I'll open," Sakura says, does.

Ino turns back to the grocery bag for a moment before dedicating a discreet study to her old crush.

He still has it, she supposes, that chill, pretty charisma. It's just it doesn't seem to matter to her anymore.

No visible weaponry (not like that's going to fool her, but it probably will sakura's parents), dressed in the simple black clothes he prefers, clean and impeccable.

"Hello," Sakura says softly. "I'll be ready in a minute, I'll just go change."

Sasuke nods, makes himself stiffly comfortable against the wall. He and Ino look at each other, an instant of awkward fellow feeling, almost amusing. Here we're standing with no words for one another as our mutual girlfriend exchanges her sleeping wear for proper clothing.

"You – turn away!" Ino hisses when she realizes the bedroom door didn't entirely close.

Sasuke gives her that infuriating Oh, I've Seen Everything Already, And I've Seen Better-look. He says, "Certainly."

Ino wants to throttle him. She also wonders what it was like to sleep with him. Fucking pervert must have accumulated some skill, after all the whoring.

It's hard to think about him like that, when he studies the kitchen with the tempered, absolute calm that hasn't ever really been Sasuke's.

Then, mercifully, Sakura reemerges, groomed and ready.

"See you later, Ino."

Sasuke deigns to nod coolly towards her, and Ino is hard pressed to it not to flip him off as he closes the door behind them.

Two calm, quiet streets later a familiar figure inches into Sakura's line of sight, and she whirls towards him.

"Shikamaru! Shikamaru!"

He turns slowly, raises an eyebrow as he walks closer.

"Sakura? Uchiha."

"Shikamaru, could you – could you please go talk to Ino? She's upset, she needs someone uninvolved to vent to."

Suddenly his disinterest doesn't seem quite so genuine. "What's up with her?"

"I'm having a child," Sakura admits with a wavering expression that could have been a smile, in another universe. In a better, simpler world where truth and love were always good things and endings were happy.

Shikamaru's refusal to look at Sasuke screams of disgust. "Whose?"

"I don't know," Sakura says very softly, then in a different tone, "Sasuke's."

"Ah," Shikamaru says, and then, "I'll talk to her," and now he isn't looking at either one of them.

"Thank you," Sakura whispers, and doesn't lift her gaze from Sasuke's feet.

"Come on," Sasuke urges her, in the extremely unpleasant tone that means she's acting like an idiot, and because she's important to him that's not funny.

She knocks on the door before opening, knowing both her parents will be home now it's weekend.

"Hello, Mom," she says, returning the hug. "Sasuke and I have something to talk to you and Dad about."

Her mother's gaze shifts to Sasuke with almost greedy swiftness – the Uchiha has been ranked extremely highly in her esteem since he rescued her daughter.

The Sasuke she knew a long time ago would have shuffled his feet awkwardly, looked up defiantly through his bangs.

Orochimaru happened.

"Mrs. Haruno," he smiles, inclining his head politely. For a moment she feels sick, because her (their) Sasuke doesn't smile for people he doesn't know, but as they step in he touches her elbow, a too-rough, clumsy gesture, and maybe things can be alright.

They are directed to the living room, and she could have laughed at the sight – grim, dramatic Sasuke of the black and white shades surrounded on all sides by modern, comfortable furniture, potted plants and happy pastel hues. He sits beside her in the baby-blue sofa (thighs brushing), so utterly unlike the traditional furniture of the Uchiha Compound, facing her parents.

"So," her mother says at last, smiling and smiling. "What was it you wanted to tell us, dear?"

"I, ah," she pauses in a moment of blind panic, forces a happy expression. "I'm expecting."

Startled excitement, laughs and another hug.

"That's wonderful," her mother says, her father nodding warm agreement.

"I like to think so," Sakura says carefully.

Overall it goes rather well.

Why shouldn't it, their farce? Sasuke's young and handsome, acclaimed prodigy, Head of the Uchiha Clan and Leader of Sound. With a son, yes, but a quiet child whose other parent passed away years ago, and her parents do not know about the other bad things (traitor, boy whore, crazy murderer). Besides, an inheritance like Sasuke's is not to be frowned upon, and certainly it doesn't hurt that suggestions of marriage are received with polite interest.

There are a few rough hurdles, a mention of regret for his lost family (she can see the quiet icy demand: _don't you touch my tragedy, my private hell_) and Sasuke isn't fond of people, but yes, overall it goes well (better).

"Even if you don't have the child," he says uncomfortably on the way home, carefully not looking at her, clearly uncomfortable. "I never thought about it. But money isn't an issue."

She realizes that given the amount of S- and A-ranks he and Naruto work they must not have much free time to waste the considerable wages on. Even Itachi probably earns his costs; the enormous inheritance from the slain clan is likely untouched.

"I get around," she says, mild and amused. That's more pleasant than being startled or touched or insulted.

Sasuke shrugs, a jerky twist to the fluent motion. "It gets harder working when the pregnancy progresses. I'll set it up with the bank, make sure you have access to the funds. If you don't want to use them, just ignore it. If you do need them, you can just go ahead."

"I appreciate the thought," she says carefully, then laughs. "Jesus, why not just grant my parents' oh so subtle plea and have a wedding?"

"If you want," Sasuke says, and her legs abruptly stop walking.

"I - what?"

He turns a calm, serious face her way, as though he could not see the fuss. "If you want to get married, I'll agree. It'd be quite practical, regarding both juridical and economical aspects. I understand the emotional issues might be harder to sort through, but I believe it would be perfectly doable."

This many shocks cannot be healthy for her.

"I," she says weakly. "It's not an option. Ino, and Naruto…"

Sasuke nods, completely unruffled. "Whichever you prefer."

She thinks: he's actually trying to show consideration.

Wants me to be happy.

Jeez, you stupid little boy, I love you so very, very much.

xxxxx

Leaf at large takes the news with quite confused gladness – isn't Sasuke sleeping with Naruto? But Sakura's a nice girl, more Uchiha children would be more than welcome… This is for the best.

Tsunade-sama raises an eyebrow at her, an almost malevolent amusement tilting her mouth. "Naruto must be ecstatic," she remarks.

"Actually, yes," Sakura takes comfort in being able to reply. "He was really quite overcome with happiness."

Tsunade-sama makes no attempt to hide her skepticism, nor her hostility. She's Naruto's, Sakura abruptly remembers, in so far as she is anyone's. "He knows you and Sasuke had a – forged a connection?"

"Well," Sakura says. "Yes. He was there."

Tsunade-sama's smile turns cunning, and rather pleased. "What'll you do if the child doesn't exhibit the Sharingan?"

Sakura shrugs, sweet helplessness painted over her face, "Then I suppose my bad blood ruined it."

"Good," smirks Tsunade-sama.

Overall, the loosely tied family centered on Team Seven is working out fairly well.

Its first next-gen member enters the Chuunin Exam with a girl from Sound and a boy from Leaf when Sakura's in the seventh month. He's five years old, the youngest but not by much.

He thinks the girl is the daughter of one of the Sound Councilors, because he's often seen her around the Council building: freckle-faced, mean-featured, with very bright red hair. The tall, gangly boy is an unknown card.

"Taro," he introduces himself after the written test. "How'd you cheat?"

"Misato," says the girl. "That's none of your business."

"Itachi," he interrupts before Taro can snap something back, even though he is certain they are very well aware already of who he is. "Who needed to cheat?"

They grin at each other, nasty, testing expression. It would seem the other two are actually nervous.

Alright, so maybe the girl has reason – whoever her parents are, he'd be surprised if they hadn't told her in no uncertain terms that if she can't finish the exam having made a good impression on the boss' son, then she'd better not return from it at all.

He nods towards the gate. "Let's go." Into the Forest of Death.

The Chuunin Exam is no longer an international event; Sand has more pressing matters to attend to, and with every other village they are at war. Hence, with only comrades to fight, the death ratio has dropped significantly, and it is rather frowned upon to trip other teams up for the hell of it now the twin villages need every ranked ninja they can get.

They work fast. Itachi soon discovers Taro has a good bulk for taijutsu, which lets Itachi and Misato engage in figurative stabbing from behind. Too bad the girl's slow after a hit to her leg, or they'd have finished much sooner.

The Final Matches too have undergone changes; they take place almost immediately after the Forest of Death experience, and everyone who's won once is out of the competition, having automatically qualified as a Chuunin. Only the worst fifth of the candidates are taken under special consideration.

Itachi's match is the sixth one, his opponent a slight Sound denizen. Itachi is a genius; there is never any question, over fast.

The changes this brings are small; he's technically authorized for B-ranks, which he has been working already on a few occasions. Finally there aren't incompetent Genin to drag him down.

More importantly, Sasuke decides his chakra is trained and developed enough for him to start employing the Sharingan in earnest. Two hours a day are devoted to the practice, Sasuke going through jutsu after jutsu after jutsu under Itachi's hungry, memorizing eyes.

The sheer amount is staggering.

"I don't understand," he admits at one point, struggling to make the chakra take the shape he imposes on it.

"You will, in time." Sasuke watches his attempts impassively, flicking hair out of his face. "Understanding's preferable, but with a Sharingan it is not necessary." In order to improve the jutsu it is, but not if you need only to execute it.

"Right," says Itachi, and manages.

It is also decided he is at liberty to stay at home by himself when his parent and Naruto are kept away by work. Often enough he takes the opportunity to seek out Kakashi-sensei or Neji-san, for (not company, he doesn't need that, he doesn't) new techniques.

Once or twice curiosity, of a reluctant, itching sort, compels him to find Sakura-san. She's huge with child, her face tired and soft, an irritated tilt to her mouth.

It occurs to him he made someone look like that once. The thought is staggeringly impossible. He's never seen the Oiroke no Jutsu utilized.

"Itachi-kun," she says, around a smile that seems forced at first but grows natural. He is aware he often makes her uncomfortable, and has some conjectures as though why.

He stares at her, as covertly as he can, at the swollen figure, the mild mien, this strange, ordinary woman who has loved his parent and his pretend-parent, lain with them.

To a certain degree he can understand, if not agree with, Sasuke's fondness for Naruto. Sakura-san is incomprehensible.

Yet she is carrying what is supposedly his sibling. He panics, blindly, manages only a strangled greeting before he flees, perspiration breaking chill and slimy over him.

Someone new he is supposed to care for and not care for, because you care for family but caring is weakness, and _people do not make sense_.

I can do this, he tells himself.

Shit. He needs to practice lying.

Calms, though, and can smile nastily at his own failure. Maybe things will turn out alright. Frankly, they have to.

xxxxxxxxxx


	45. Trouble in Paradise

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 45:**

"**Trouble in Paradise"**

Having observed Sasuke as closely as she did, Sakura expected her pregnancy to be a terror. As the months pass, she finds, gratified, that it is not.

She feels heavy, grounded, lazy and contented, like her life has been moved out of the world, placed inside the protective entrapment of her body. There are bad parts, of course there are – she just has to scream sometimes, because she's still scared and now she's so hatefully clumsy, so frustratingly huge and helpless. There are the days when she's annoyed and the ones when she cries over anything and everything.

Her precious people are great, though. Ino's gotten over the worst of it, stays close and dry and on top of things. Takes care that their freak-outs are never simultaneous.

Naruto and Sasuke try to make time, and they are – better than she'd have expected. Especially Sasuke: Naruto has always been kind, warm, helpful, and is no stranger to the trials and tribulations of attempting to oversee his girlfriend's pregnancy.

He hates it when she cries (she is patently sure that whatever antics sasuke got up to, crying was not among them, though perhaps it would've been better if it had been) but sports a soppy grin when he manages to trick a smile from her. Rainbow under abiding rain. He's less of a pushover than she'd have imagined, though, gets exasperated sometimes and frankly tells her so. No, strawberries during this season, that's just silly. Here, I'll massage your feet instead.

Sasuke makes some kind of effort, either letting down radical barriers or putting on a spectacular show. He actually does smile at her, and although she is certain that's almost always forced, she appreciates the thought.

Naruto's touch is always straightforward, warm and simple; Sasuke's is the antithesis, soft brushes, sharp presence.

It should not come as a surprise to anyone who has seen them fight. Naruto rushes in headfirst, headstrong, crushes you. Sneaky strategies there might be, but there's an incurable streak of honesty. She has no doubt he can be rough, but would never suspect it from the way he moves around her, all awkward grace and careless smiles.

Sasuke, their brave proud broken Sasuke who charged Orochimaru in the Forest of Death eight years ago, is dead though not buried; so is the Orochimaru who laughed at him, pushed and pulled until only the core of him could remain, tainted, pure, a lonely twisted thing that glimmered in the right light only.

Now there is this strange, also-loved creature, these kind cunning touches and sidelong looks.

Kakashi is what he is, what she needs him to be, when she runs into him. He's never been quite human to her, trapped in the failed role as teacher and thus denied a great part of his personhood.

Itachi she sees but rarely; he seems to take the arrangement rather well in stride, but she cannot read him as clearly as she'd need to in order to be certain. She understands he is attending the Sound Academy now, a little belatedly, and acing it.

She's heard speculative gossip about when he'll make Jounin. Right after graduation? Nah, Uchiha wouldn't want to risk him so readily… You think? But the clan pride? Ah well, we'll see.

"What are you going to do about that?" she asks one day, rubbing at her face, inching it away from an uncomfortable pillow. A little later, eyes properly open, she realizes she'd fallen asleep on Sasuke's shoulder. That he let her.

"About what?" Sasuke asks, looking up from his stack of documents but not aborting his fast, left-handed signing (i was leaning on his right shoulder).

"About Itachi's Jounin exam."

He gives her a look that sneers: _what bloody business do you imagine that is of yours?_

She shrinks away, angry and disappointed, but the couch isn't large and she doesn't get far.

Then the annoyance is gone as fast as it appeared. He puts the apparently finished papers away, sits back.

"I haven't made a final decision yet. I'd like to send him out with Kakashi for the trial, but since I finally managed to maneuver him onto the Council instead of that idiot redhead he's rather short on time."

"There's no question he's going to pass?"

"No," Sasuke says with preternatural calm. "There is no question."

Sitting pressed up against the edge of the couch is not very comfortable so she eases back down, towards him, settling again against his side. Initially he freezes, snappish tension violently present in every line of his body, like he always does. She is aware he is not used to being touched, not outside missions and the bedroom.

Gradually, with a light, forced exhalation, the tension uncoils. He's boneless now, rather chilly to the touch but inviting, through some minute detail in his posture.

(naruto's crush on her was about wanting normalcy, and he has gone beyond that now. her fascination with sasuke was about wanting something beyond normalcy, and she must admit she has never quite left that longing behind)

Naruto clearly remembers her violent recoil early on in the hospital, _we can never happen again! that should never have occurred!_ He's careful to keep his presence light and humorous, the kind touches never shading over into intimacy. Naruto is tactile but has little experience touching the people he loves outside of sex, she knows that (no one through his childhood, and sasuke is what he is, and itachi doesn't let him) but they do not want each other.

Sasuke did know once, knew his mother's caresses and pecks, his father's hand on his shoulder, Itachi-niisan poking fun at him, but that was long ago. She thinks that's perhaps why he was so lost with Itachi – those innocent relationships have long since been soiled. Itachi-niisan in the most brutally obvious way, and as for his parents… how large is the difference, really, between an estranged parent and a close teacher? Orochimaru happened, in two ways, and Kakashi.

Bodies being close without evident need, violent or sexual, are bodies lying. She is well aware he perceives reality in this way, and thinks he is aware of it too, that at times he attempts to believe differently.

He shifts, his eyes gaining the determined glean that means he is going to succeed at being a good friend if it kills him, he is going to get these strange impossible notions right, fight through until he's made it.

"Tsunade wants him to get it over with as fast as humanly possible." An expression she is at a loss to decipher chases over his face. "He's the living symbol of the Leaf/Sound union, a pretty prodigy poster boy. With Hanabi damaged, a new public symbol would make things easier."

His fingers absently drum against, stroke over, her neck. It's at the same time painfully awkward and achingly sensual.

My silly boy, she thinks, and knows he'd never forgive her that epithet.

It's true, of course. Hanabi is – very damaged.

Sasuke hears most of what he knows from Kakashi, who spends quite some time with Anko, who's still in charge of the girl.

It's shit work, but in a way they get along;

"Hey, brat!" Anko hollers. "Get out here, we're off to train!"

Hanabi does not respond verbally but appears obediently in the doorway, gear strapped on, starkly white hair still too short to be tied up and falling wildly around her face. She looks a wizened dandelion, with the brittle pallid halo ready to be blown away by a careless wind.

"We're taking the route through the village," Anko adds. Translation: Cover up your legs.

"Alright," Hanabi replies tonelessly, slipping back into their bedroom to don longer pants. It's a small, messy apartment in a loud part of the village ("cleanliness is a virtue, young lady. little girls should be seen and not heard" _get the fuck out of my head!_), where cicadas and punks are heard in the evenings. Tsunade suggested she relocate, now the precious Hyuuga princess has been forced on her, but Anko refused. Hanabi is already too much like Anko used to be; Anko doesn't need sedate, quiet buildings to remind her as well.

Besides, she knows the drill too well from personal experience, all the possibilities; nightmares, hyperventilation, cutting, fugue, what-the-fuck-ever – knows she'd better keep a close eye on the girl.

This means Hanabi sleeps, in so far as she does sleep, on the dusty mattress on the floor beside Anko's thicker futon.

She returns shortly, the ugly grayish stumps and the unnatural dollish feet covered by a wide expanse of fabric.

Anko nods. "Let's go."

She has to hand it to the girl, infuriating mute wraith though she might be in private; she aces her role. Leaf's Princess smiles, nods polite greeting, walking proud and graceful through the crowded streets.

Anko remembers that; how easy people are to fool.

Hanabi mastered the new legs exactly as fast and completely as one would expect of a genius. And whatever else happened, however damaged she might be as a human, Anko doesn't estimate more than three or four ninja in the village could beat her.

Overall, Anko summarizes, panting and grinning dementedly after a long hard bout of training, my girl's remarkably intact, all things considered (might be a good thing, might not).

She does look a doll, with scars like seams over the pale, coarse skin. There's a particular, thick line, reminiscent of white rope, across the nape of her neck, an absolutely straight line. Her chest is one big messy knot of scar tissue, and her palms and thighs have been deliberately marked, arcane nonsense symbols traced deep into her flesh. Her untouched face, the bruises healed now and the broken jaw, seems almost a mockery, though one Anko knows they should be grateful for.

She's pieced together the incident bit by bit: Hanabi does not speak voluntarily but answers questions readily enough, short and concise, without evasion or protest.

Did they set your nerves on fire with chakra?

Yes.

Carve you open, heal you enough you'd live, maybe pour something nasty over the wounds before they continued chopping away?

Yes.

Mind-fuck you?

Yes.

Rape you?

Yes.

Have you hurt your 'mates?

Yes.

Through a lifetime with acquaintances such as Orochimaru of the Bingo Book and Morino Ibiki, ANBU Head Inquisitor, Anko has collected an impressive repertoire of nasty questions. So far the answer has been yes to every one of them.

Hanabi volunteers nothing; Anko is left to conjecture, because she is not going to ask what exactly Hanabi did to her Genin team. She's never had one herself, but she knows Kakashi, and she knows what happened and how that affected him. Knows she doesn't want Hanabi's problems to be hers; I've got enough on my plate, kiddo, sorry.

("...give you a choice, princess – he's going to die, you see? yeah, you do, good girl. either i do it slowly, or you do it right now, i'll chop both your heads off inch by inch otherwise, here's a knife, princess, show me what you got, yeah?")

(and i was weak, and i wanted to live, and suffering is pointless in and of itself)

She does know that Hanabi does not stop _looking_. The Byakugan have not once been deactivated since she was placed under Anko's care, not for a fraction of an instant. Sleep has been replaced with a kind of trance, fractured cat-naps. Even closed the Bloodline Limit eyes are activated, the lines stark around descended lids swollen from lack of rest.

The child eats, though, and trains and speaks. Is – functional, if not well or even improving, because she's been the same from the outset of their strange companionship.

She does not discriminate, presents the same distant, scornful and obedient demeanor to her family (who have finally stopped interfering because the patriarch can't stand it and no one else cares) and Kakashi (substitute teacher once when anko handled an assignment) as she does to Anko.

Anko wonders idly, acerbically, whether it's considered implied in her job description to take Hanabi to bed. Fix the rape trauma so the girl's fit for marriage, so she won't kill the breeding partner who is to help bring those desired genius heirs into future existence (a ninja village is a ninja village, whether it styles itself one of the good guys or not).

Not that Hanabi seems to think much about that part. She isn't more averse to being touched than she is to speaking: never initiates it, keeps it short and to the point, but doesn't refuse. Recognizes the necessity.

What's a virginity compared to two legs?

To the lives of your friends, of your family, whom you have killed?

Nah, Anko reflects with what could be grimness, Hanabi won't grieve a trauma she is probably subconsciously convinced she deserved.

She lets Anko fight and feed and fuck her. Doesn't smile, doesn't cry, doesn't rage.

_Just keep me hanging on._

xxxxx

The first pangs of labor scare her, of course. She thinks: no, I didn't mean it when I said I wanted to get it over with, please, just a little more time, only a little, oh god please…

She tells herself firmly to shut up being hysterical. I'm a ninja, it's time I acted it.

"_We'll have to cut him up."_

Stop it!

She has the horrible remembrance of how, beyond the adrenaline and pain-endorphins and plain desolate (liberating) hopelessness, giving birth was one of the worst experiences of Sasuke's life.

Other such highlights, she assumes, must be Massacre Night, and whatever happened between him and Naruto before the Tsukiyomi. Killing Itachi, being mind-raped by Orochimaru.

It isn't like that, for her. She has medic nin to help, the best of the best, is so drugged on chakra it hardly hurts. Ino's fingers are dry and cool around her left hand; Naruto's sweaty fist crushes her right. His eyes are wildly blue, frightened and awed and amazed, just blown away. Like a kid in a candy shop, and so sweet she aches for him.

He can't believe it, he seriously can't believe it – Sakura-chan, their Sakura-chan, is giving birth to their child. A brand new person, who's ours.

He thought there weren't any happy endings left.

Well, maybe this is a happy beginning.

He meets Ino's anxious eyes briefly before dropping his gaze back to its default-focus, Sakura-chan's drug-soft, upset-contorted face, the green eyes that have looked so far inside him.

"Ah," she says, and abruptly, magically, it is over.

Ino turns her attention to the end of the bed, to Tsunade lifting something from between Sakura-chan's legs where Naruto is still careful not to look (_we should never have happened!_) and he helps Sakura-chan sit up a little, leaning weakly, spent, against the pillows.

"Here," Tsunade is saying, her voice curiously loud and far away, and Naruto's on his tip-toes, leaning forward hazardously over Sakura-chan to see the cloth-swathed bundle the Hokage hands her.

Ino does not move but her posture suggests stepping back; Naruto cannot help surging forward, painfully buzzed with excitement. Sakura-chan's smile is the purest, _goodest_ vision of love he's ever seen.

Then he sees the child, her trembling fingers pushing fabric away, exposing the little face, and it is so much the same and so violently different from Sasuke and Itachi, five years ago.

The baby looks normal – that is to say, mostly like a hairless rat, and it's appalling it can be so irresistibly adorable in spite of that. There is no awareness in the unremarkable eyes.

"My little girl," Sakura-chan says, and cries the happy tears.

Tsunade nods, drying her hands off. "Should I send in the grandparents and the," her lips curls, "no doubt overjoyed father?"

"Do," Naruto says when it becomes apparent that speaking is rather beyond Sakura-chan at the moment. She nods, so Tsunade is off, presumably to alert the rest of the family.

It did not surprise Naruto that Sasuke immediately backed down when Tsunade clarified she wouldn't allow more than two bystanders during the procedure. Sasuke who hates being helpless, who kills with such desperate passion to keep his precious people safe, keep his demons at bay.

Naruto wasn't there, but he has heard enough about Itachi's birth to be well aware it was a nightmare.

This one was a dream coming true.

xxxxx

Rina is a normal child. Her childhood isn't, but she has no awareness of either fact. She's just a bundle, a warm weight possessing basic emotions and low-rate motor functions.

She's gorgeous.

Sakura realizes love can be certain the day her daughter is born: speculation and calculation are suddenly unnecessary. Life will work itself out, now it has a steady center.

Ino is a good foster mother, acting rather like a kindly aunt: laughs with the kid, reads her stories and lets her browse the inventory of the flower shop. The mundane routines aren't hers.

Rina's grandparents are completely in love with her, and Sakura knows she could count on Kakashi too to take care of the child. She would only need to ask, he'd be happy to, and she is well aware he's capable, thinks he is perhaps the only one who has ever successfully managed to treat Itachi as a child, but she is uncomfortable with the idea.

Considering him a pedophile isn't accurate, because she is well aware he didn't want Sasuke because of anything related to age, and Sasuke who knows him so much better and is paranoid besides trusted him with Itachi, and Sakura loves him, she does (and thinks anko might too, in a damaged way) but nevertheless fact remains that she's glad she needs never entrust Rina into his care.

Her daughter, after all, has more parents than most.

It never stops being unclear, as she grows up, whose child she is, and her appearance offers no clues: Sakura's green eyes, curly brown hair, pointy childish features in which no particular resemblance can be traced. Her chakra looks promising, but that would be expected regardless of whether she's Sasuke's or Naruto's.

It never stops being unclear: and it never starts to matter.

She calls Naruto _Daddy_. He's the perfect weekend parent, Sakura reflects. Absolutely, helplessly, consumingly in love with the girl, more than happy to play and comfort and spoil, and Itachi's very brief childhood has taught him the necessities of feeding, changing and the occasional scolding.

Sasuke's face blanks every time he is addressed as _Father_, but he handles it. It boggles the mind to see the Uchiha avenger switch a dirty diaper, even though she was quite well aware, intellectually, that he must have trained himself to expertise in this field before Itachi grew up.

He is definitely the more distanced kind of parent, with little to no idea of what to do with a genuinely innocent and hapless little girl who is supposed to be his daughter. He is Itachi's mother much more than Rina's father, but considering what the children are like… well, it was to be expected.

Itachi thinks of the girl rather much as a pet – she's helpless and soft, of no particular use, needs to be cared for meticulously in exchange for sharing some of that chubby warmth, that unthinking comfort.

She drools on nii-san's Jounin License when he's almost nine and she's three. He pats her head.

(yes, i loved inku)

Love is in the air, destructive and hateful, when he comes home, leaving his sister to her mother.

He feels the chakra tension almost immediately he steps into the Compound, runs towards it with more haste than caution, stupidly but inevitably, because he _knows_ these signs, this _sakki_.

He realizes almost immediately, and it is a chilling insight, that he's never seen them fight before. Has seen training matches, and hissed arguments, and once or twice a punch that was serious, abruptly aborted the second his presence was discovered.

It's like how he's seen a few kisses, a handful lingering touches, is well aware they do sleep with each other, but he's never seen that either.

This time it's for real.

Naruto's chakra blares red around him, not a trace of blue discernable, and Itachi knows he can go no further, couldn't move, couldn't run if he did.

Things have been brewing, for some time. All of them know that, they're not blind and the signs are there: the short exchanges, the radiating tension, the frustrated set of mouths and shoulders. Snappy insults, too-hard hugs, whispers of something breaking out of normal life.

Sasuke is sick of inactivity, of herding the stupid sheep of council rooms, of attempting and failing effortless sweetness with a child he can't handle, and it takes so much before he can snap these days. I lived for a purpose; that purpose is gone, and just living isn't – I'm no good, it's no good, and it's all _such a gigantic shattered mess_.

I don't know what to do.

It takes all too little before Naruto snaps these days, Kyuubi breathing down his neck (through my mind), gaining on him with every fight; and it scares him stiff, and that makes him angry, and that releases the demon even further, which scares him more, which makes him angrier, which–

I don't know what to do.

And today he finally heard the whole story about Sand, bloody civil war raging for years, his friend caught up in the worst of it, the secret kept carefully from Naruto because – what, he still can't be trusted, no one cares, it's everyone for themselves and you aren't allowed to even try to be better? You're just stupid monsters, not people, not good for anything, not worth anything, not when it matters.

Then the hot liberty of taking a hard swing at Sasuke, of seeing that mad grin back. Thought is obsolete: there is the fellow fury, the stupid strangling connection that chafes so badly sometimes he just wants to claw it off but he can't, he can't. No holds bared anymore, no pretending or sugar-coating, just the raw reality underneath, the craving and the resentment,_ I need you_.

Addiction, dependence; and it drives him mad. Finally belonging wasn't supposed to be this hateful, was it?

_It's the promise of a lifetime!_

And that broken vow still lies between them, sharp as broken things are, and they're cut, they're being cut so badly all the time, every bad moment, and there are too many of those, when you're trapped in everyday life that you were traumatized too badly to fit into long ago.

This is vicious and ugly and petty, an epic battle about all the little grating issues.

Just two idiots, stripped down (worn down) to the important bits. Winning and dominance and everything that went wrong, the unforgiven and unforgotten, and all the love that's never quite enough.

Not right now.

Can you live on love alone? Is it possible? Is it desirable?

Since Itachi they have been trying, and it's good for so long but only for so long. There are things the boy shouldn't see, he should have the best they can offer him, on Sasuke's unspoken insistence and Naruto's immediate agreement; but _will_ and _attempt_ can only carry you so far.

They can't really manage adult arguments. Sasuke closes off, snappish, or drawls coldly, words slithering like snakes, and Naruto doesn't know what to say, wants to yell and curse.

They are too primal, too essential, for words and compromises, for the abstraction that is language.

He takes a swing at Sasuke, a harsh movement of a human limb, mirrored on a much grander scale by the gigantic red hand of chakra.

My body is still sixteen years old. It will never age.

There's a sound – soft, breaking through only because it really, really doesn't fit into the scenario.

Yes, Sasuke's frayed around the edges, as would Naruto have been if he could help healing automatically and immediately, but there is no way, no way in hell, that that clumsy burst of raw, angry power should have touched him.

And it didn't. Not Sasuke, not my Uchiha.

Uchiha Itachi is on the ground, crouched protectively around his side; he must not have dodged well enough, must've been graced by the chakra burn.

Suddenly there is nothing companionable at all left in this fight, and the unforgivable is very close to the surface.

He could say, "I didn't mean to!"

There would be the reply, "I don't fucking care!"

Neither one wastes his breath on speech.

Suddenly Sasuke is up close and personal, impossibly fast, pressing pain into Naruto's torso; he hasn't felt it in what could be forever, injuries always heal before they've fully manifested, but Sasuke's hand now and the chakra it flares with are something different.

A seal, it must be a seal, and he howls and kicks at Sasuke, who hangs on to him like a malicious leech; Naruto can feel the seal impose its will through him even as he buries his fist in Sasuke's mouth.

It's a morbid sight when Sasuke straightens, gritty redness smeared thickly over the hollows of his face and throat (where the scars were, we'll always remember them).

While Naruto stares at the blood Sasuke knees him in the stomach.

Through the fog of demon chakra he becomes aware that it actually hurts. Looking up, he realizes the supernatural healing is not the only aspect of Kyuubi that Sasuke intends to subdue.

Fuck you, bastard, no way will I let you finish that seal you're forming now.

Naruto lashes out, grabbing one of the white hands, crushing it in his fist, bones snapping like kindling. Grimacing like a bloody skull, Sasuke smashes an elbow into his face and rips free, continuing to move his hands through chakra alone, bending unwilling digits.

The seal's ready, vibrating across his palms, and fuck oh fuck, Naruto struggles to get a leg up, infuses it with as much chakra as he can, kicks out and sends Sasuke flying backwards. He's too angry to hold back, throws himself right after, landing on his hands and knees over him, grabs his shirt and bangs his upper body into the ground.

Shit, shit shit shit, he forgot to account for Sasuke's dexterity, and now the new seal is being pressed into him, Sasuke's hands locked relentless around his head, and he screams, or Kyuubi screams (we both scream), and at last Sasuke releases his grip – only to punch him in the throat.

Naruto gags, is pushed off of him, ends up on his back with Sasuke sitting on his stomach, blood dripping into his eyes from Sasuke's panting mouth.

He's sick and dizzy from the sealing, feeling his abdomen burn around the main key. Thinks, _to hell with it_, and lands a punch Sasuke is too furious and careless to avoid.

Gets him good, right in the eye. One less Mangekyou to worry about.

With Kyuubi so predominant, all instinct and animal awareness, Naruto might have fought with his own eyes closed, if he needed to.

Now… Well now he does his best to give as good as he gets when Sasuke hisses in sheer insane hatred (i am so scared) and bashes Naruto's thick head again and again into the ground.

Sophisticated ninja, my ass.

When Sasuke finally stops it takes Naruto a while to reorganize his mind into something approaching functional state. Sky overhead, check. Head spinning but still attached, check. Body aching like mad but basically in one piece, check.

Also, crowd gathered. Check and shit.

Sasuke, still hovering over him and breathing hard through the bleeding misery that was his mouth, composes himself with a short, sharp burst of effort and stares the spectators down with chill haughty indifference. You've gotta admit and admire his gall, bloody bitch though he may be.

"Yes?"

"You two…" Shizune mutters. "Are you able to get up?"

She's crouching beside Itachi, who stares at them, curled protectively in around his side. The impact from the demon chakra itch-burns under Shizune-san's healing touch, and yet he can't tear his eyes away from the sight in front of him.

Sasuke struggles upward gradually, unsteady but standing, and holy hell, no one except Shizune and Naruto can even remember seeing him injured, and now his face is covered in blood, one eye swelling shut.

Naruto too inches up, on his elbows first and then slowly to his feet.

Many of the surrounding buildings are in varying states of ruin, and Shizune is not the only outsider intruding; she's flanked by a handful Sound ninja and half a dozen ANBU.

He decides that they, like this throbbing physical pain, do not actually matter very much.

Sasuke stands straight as pride, staring them silent by force of a single Mangekyou eye.

(i wish kakashi were here)

xxxxxxxxx


	46. You Can Fuck Off

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 46:**

"**You Can Fuck Off"**

_Living is fighting; when you succumb to mere survival you might as well be dead. _

Tsunade-sama said that to me once, Shizune remembers. She has the impression it's a doctrine many ninja subscribe to; especially the legendary ones.

It is also childish, and disgustingly stupid.

She thinks about the past, which is easier, watching the Kyuubi host and the Uchiha Clan Head. Trained healer's eyes, and knowing ones, used to observing a fading loved one, a cherished mentor-friend lost in old grief.

Not thinking about Orochimaru anymore, shaking off the past, she observes Uchiha straightening, taking a step forward – he sways alarmingly, for a moment she is certain he is in for a humiliating fall, but with the arrogant grace of a thoroughbred genius he manages to turn it into an awkward kind of swaggering, as though he had intended all along to move in exactly this way.

Naruto, with less face to lose and with a seal burning blinding through him, has abandoned pretenses and is clinging to something that was once part of a house.

Idiot boys.

Except they are not boys anymore, regardless of Naruto's physical age, and no one can afford for them to be idiots.

Shizune is not intimidated by the Sharingan leveled at her, sinks to her knees with brisk, trained grace beside the littlest Uchiha prodigy. Normally one does not waste chakra on healing wounds that could mend naturally; one fixes the worst, leaves the rest to time.

Not so with the important ones, those who are needed at full strength.

Nor, she decides, with this boy. He's sitting very still, looking past her; he's important enough, and guiltless enough, in this matter, that she pulls his shirt away (he twitches) and strokes soft green chakra over his side until the nasty red burns have melted away, leaving unblemished white skin.

"Right then," she says reluctantly, standing. "Who needs to be healed first?"

She is ignored, bites her mouth shut and bides her time. Her profession might not be glamorous, but it is necessary. Always that.

Normally, addressing his village, Uchiha is composed, as though taken out of time itself: untouchable. Courteous in a short-spoken, condescending fashion. He turns to them now, dismissive.

Over the years Shizune has grown friendly with Sakura, and the younger kunoichi has let things slip, through the course of their acquaintance: Shizune would not have noticed Uchiha being tense, or Naruto regretful, after they have fought. Would have seen Uchiha being displeased and Naruto angry and awkward; would not have made the translation.

This time the dictionary is simpler. Measured, beaten up, Uchiha is the personification of a hollow victory, a bruise swaying on the wind. He says, with that rusty, smooth voice chopped like a kid's, "You can fuck off."

It is interesting to see that his minions are trained too well, fears too badly, to hesitate. Shizune does not doubt for an instant that they will be conspiring, but obviously they know better than to even hint at such behavior in front of their Orochimaru-sama. The ANBU are marginally more persistent, unwilling to give ground, but (and this makes her a little uneasy) it is never a possibility for them to disobey.

Overall, she summarizes tiredly, this day could have gone better.

It could also, she is unpleasantly aware, have gone significantly worse.

(sasuke was well aware things had come to a head, or very shortly would, when naruto stormed in, fisted his claws in the front of sasuke's shirt and bodily lifted him out of the chair he had not bothered to rise from.

we did not wet our lips.

and sasuke tilted his head back, and smirked, brushing naruto's hands off as though they were inconsequential.

"you didn't fucking tell me about sand!"

and there was something pure and basic, and nothing else existed: back to the primeval state, the compulsion to own.

kill you or fuck you, and he was damn tired of being a slave to his libido – or worse, his stunted _emotions_ – around naruto)

"Go away, please, Shizune-san," Naruto says, fraying. "I don't need to be healed, I just need this asshole to take off the damn seals."

"Forget it," Sasuke sneers.

"Hey, idiot, you'd better!"

And this is rapidly reaching an entirely new level of stupid, he can't even formulate an answer. His head throbs. It's a dumb, childish argument, and why does he care so much, why can't I just let it go?

Why can we never let go? Why is he scared just thinking it?

Shizune sighs. "Will you release him if I heal you first?"

Sasuke nods, quickly. _Don't think._

The seals will not hold, Shizune thinks. She also thinks: Itachi shouldn't be here. They must be aware of that.

Reminds herself it is not actually her problem, steps up to mend the broken hand, take the swelling off his eye. She makes her voice hard and professional, with only a little impatience bleeding through: "What more? No, never mind." He does not argue when she continues working on his head, healing a severe concussion and a fractured jaw. She feels unaccustomedly disgusted, so close to the smell of blood; slips a hand down to his stomach, where Naruto's knee hit again and again, by way of his abused lower ribs.

That must be enough; he steps back with exceptional, expected rudeness. "Leave."

"Fine," she says, reminding herself sharply that this is not about Tsunade-sama, not in any way. "Fine."

There are things worth fighting for, yes, but she has made her choices, different ones.

She is glad to leave the Compound behind, where Itachi looks up through his lashes as Sasuke strides forward and kneels in front of him with the meticulously controlled movements of extremely unsteady people.

Itachi is disgusted with himself: I couldn't do anything.

Hasn't even stood up, even though he was healed first despite plainly being the one least injured.

Swelling still circles Sasuke's right eye, there are still obviously serious bruises forming on his body; behind him Naruto looks as though he can barely stand despite his clinging to what was once a wall.

Itachi can't look; Itachi can't tear his eyes away.

The smell of blood is overwhelming, as the embarrassing sweetness, when Sasuke slips his arms around him in a swift, hard movement. For a brief, shocked moment Itachi is pressed into Sasuke's body, lost in intensity, and he can't – can't quite understand it's real.

Obviously he could not have avoided seeing Sasuke hurt people. His parent kills for a living, rules a village of outcasts, outlaws.

He's never seen Sasuke emotionally affected by this, never mind beaten up.

It is not exactly an embrace that he is caught in now, he is aware of this. It is too complex for that, need translated into a physicality that can't quite contain it.

Sasuke pulls back before Itachi has reacted, and – slaps him hard enough he almost falls.

No, Itachi acknowledges. I am not even on the same level.

His Sharingan informs him that Sasuke's chakra is drained to less than half its normal quantity, and rational thought supplies the information Shizune-san can hardly have healed even most of his wounds, and yet Itachi did not even see the hit coming.

"Hey!" Naruto calls from somewhere far away, but no one pays him any mind.

"Don't you ever," Sasuke says in a thick voice that stretches his swollen lips, makes fresh blood drip down his chin, "don't you fucking ever get close to that kind of fight again. You see that sort of chakra, you run the other way, do I make myself clear?"

"Yes," Itachi says, as expressionlessly as he can. Sasuke has never hit him before, not once, not ever, not in punishment.

There's a thud, and Naruto lands beside them, on his knees, almost toppling forward.

He really does look bad, perspiration washing clean streaks through the grime and blood in his bruising face.

"You alright?" he grunts.

Itachi nods, a strangely constricted movement. "Yes." His cheek aches (from being pressed into sasuke's ribs, from sasuke's hand). Not much, but he cannot stop thinking about it.

Naruto turns back to Sasuke, staring balefully up at him. "Undo the seals, bastard."

He is regretful, relieved: certainly he never meant to involve Itachi. On the other hand, he wasn't the one to _deliberately_ slap the kid around.

Sasuke gives him an even, considering glance out of eyes still glaring red from the Mangekyou Sharingan.

It's hard to imagine this crisp, adult Sasuke rolled around on the ground throwing punches ten minutes ago.

Naruto rather misses that Sasuke, the wild freedom of it.

He also dares not even think of how strange it is not to have Kyuubi roaring through his mind, echoing through his skull.

"I'm not taking any more chances," Sasuke informs him, still in that distracted, determined tone. "If you harm a hair on his head, I'll land you in a coma until I can seal you up permanently."

"I'd never intentionally hurt him!"

The look Sasuke gives him is – it reinvents the meaning of _cutting_. "You've been happy enough to reap the benefits from the threat you might. I'm not stupid."

"The hell are you on about?"

Sasuke's face is a study in superior nastiness; so fake, so brittle. Naruto knows.

Knows the necessity of masks, knows that some things are untouchable because you _cannot bear them_, but now he has touched, punched through that raw core, all the deepest darkest things, the bleak ugly vicious brokenness.

He can't regret it; regrets the causes of that core too much for anything else to register.

At twelve, when he got too close, Sasuke snorted and yelled and kicked his ass; left him alive because he'd rather have been dead, just then.

At fifteen they screamed at each other, and fought and fucked and loathed and craved.

Today, at twenty-four, Sasuke destroys him again (again and again, back and forth, on and on). He sneers, hisses, "You imagine I'd have let you get away with _all_ _that shit_ if I didn't have to protect someone else?"

"Sasuke, don't fucking start. Not now."

The tilt to the edge of Sasuke's mouth, discernable now through the drying blood, says: You hypocritical coward.

The main part of his expression says: Wise.

Naruto's vision is getting blurry around the edges; Kyuubi's yells are reverberating inside his skull, and the nasty sound jutsu Sasuke hit him with earlier is not making things better on that front (jesus, poor itachi, someone should remember about him).

He is close to blacking out.

Some kind of calculation's going on in Sasuke, that much is clear (when the hell isn't it?), but right now Naruto does not care about anything except about how Sasuke makes a sharp, slashing motion, chanting incomprehensible words before he presses a hand heavy with chakra to Naruto's abdomen, where the first seal hit him.

They are both aware it should not be this easy to break it, but Kyuubi's power continues pushing, against a restriction that is suddenly no longer there. He has to close his eyes and fight inwards to keep the entity constrained.

That is when he realizes both the seals are not gone: the one blocking Kyuubi's chakra from his use is still intact.

Oh shit – oh, _god_, I can't hold it in. He is going to explode, burst like an overdue womb. A million little pieces of Naruto-ness.

He throws a glance as Sasuke like a prayer, and they are what they are after all; the red chakra is frying him from inside out, and Sasuke's power is leaking into him, something he can augment his own failing strength with.

When he regains his senses, Kyuubi a hot murmur shading everything dark, Sasuke is giving him a look so blank he must be desperately anxious.

It's hard to be angry, even though nothing at all has been resolved.

Gingerly, testing out his limbs, he clambers into a sitting position; Sasuke moves away just enough that Naruto can inspect himself. There's no pain at all, and burned, ripped cloth parts over perfectly smooth skin.

"Itachi," Sasuke says. "Leave us alone for a bit."

Naruto shakes his head; poor kid shouldn't have to be alone, and anyway: "I'm going to Sand."

Sasuke raises an eyebrow but does not take the bait. "You need to clear that with Tsunade before you leave, and there's no way in hell she'll approve."

Another soft shake of his head, brimmed to implode though it might be. "I'm leaving now. Gaara's my friend, I have to." He tries a shaky smile that won't work. "You can authorize it. Time to exploit that double citizenship they gave me after the mess with Rock."

"Fine," Sasuke says shortly. "I'll talk to Tsunade. You can represent Leaf in Sand; you will be bringing a Sound squad with you. Aiwa's."

"Alright." He gets on fairly well with Aiwa, and it's – surprisingly reasonable.

"Make sure you're leading the expedition, but Aiwa may act as a diplomat from Sound with regular privileges." After all, Sasuke does not care about Sand (hardly even about sound). "Don't fuck the healer post-battle."

"What?" It's a rather flat outburst. I can't believe I _can_ believe he said that.

"You heard me."

"What the hell are you trying to do?"

"She's rather pretty," Sasuke replies. "She's also weak."

"Yeah, whatever, asshat." It's what he can say, shaken and hurt and still so angry at all the not-hidden things. We lie again; or we try to, but we can't really, not to each other. "I'm off. Bye, Itachi."

He walks away fast, through the ruined Compound (can't believe sasuke lost it _in here_) without looking back and without clutching at the seal burning through his stomach, or at his pounding head.

There was no point inquiring about the seal. Such a simple design will not hold for more than a few hours.

Aiwa gives him a rather careful stare as he marches into the barrack. "Naruto-sama?" he inquires, politely enough – either there is no distaste, though rumors ought to be ripe already and Naruto's rather grimy state supports them, or it is very well masked.

"Gather your squad," Naruto tells him, searching through a chest for weaponry and fresh clothing. "We're going to Sand."

"Sir." Since the man has apparently survived long enough to learn to discern Sasuke's considerably subtler bad moods, it's not surprising he realizes that this is not the time to ask questions. After all, Naruto is one of the few people authorized to command his services.

He returns shortly, accompanied by nine others, all of whom carrying light luggage.

"Right," Naruto says. He knows someone else would argue for planning, but scripting battles just don't work, and he'd be kidding himself if he imagined they were going for anything but that. He'll do what he can, do what he does best: wing it, baby.

Speaking of babes – he sees the healer, and freezes in dismay.

She's lithe, short, with thick black hair that makes her look pale and these big green eyes.

Like some kind of cosmic trickster has decided to mix Sasuke and Sakura-chan, adding up all the surface qualities but forgetting about the high chakra level and the sheer toughness.

Go to hell, Sasuke.

And by the way, fuck you very much, Murphy, you and your stupid law.

Sasuke's practically dared Naruto to sleep with her, and if he does he'll have proved he's an idiot, an animal (a fucking monster). They both know the only way he'd cheat is if he stumbled upon someone he could want when the abating battle fury whispers lurid threats in his ears, and yeah, Sasuke's absolutely right: he'd go for her.

Pretty and sweet, Sakura-chan's eyes in Sasuke's face.

He'd fuck her up completely.

While it might not matter to him personally whether they have a healer, the rest of the team may well suffer lethal injury.

Besides, he'd hardly parade around happy with life after what would probably amount to violating her. Not that he'd force her, but she's Sound and that means if her commander wants her she'll lie back and spread, and he knows he can be – call it rough, call it ardent, but whatever.

(i wish kakashi-sensei were here)

"Let's go, then. We're gonna help Gaara solve this damn conflict once and for all!"

xxxxx

When Naruto's footsteps have faded, Itachi discovers he cannot breathe without effort. Phantom pain burns across his side, through his cheek.

He feels like a rabbit, small and trembling and needy. This is a distasteful state of being that he has learned to live with, but it is not usually so pronounced.

_I'm not a child._

(_but you want to be_)

(_don't you_)

_Yes_, and the admittance is torn from him, there seems no point to try and resist. Yes, I want to be his baby, I want him to love me, I want to be necessary and precious.

Almost is all he's ever had, and almost isn't good enough.

He watches, hungry prey eyes when he should have been an effortless predator, watches the center of his universe stand again, steady now if no less grimy.

His face is heated, where it was pressed against Sasuke's body, jaw scratching painfully against pronounced ribs; where it met Sasuke's palm with an audible smack.

It is the first time he remembers being touched with that kind of frenzy, honest desperation. He's still breathing unsteadily from it, so far from the measured, careful, well calculated touches he normally receives. Never before has it occurred to him that Sasuke might be afraid of breaking him; there have just been the seething resentment and envy and scared relief that he is behaved towards like Sakura-san, kindly and gently, rather than like – this. This ruined ground, Naruto and hard raw love and feelings boiling over.

Looking properly at his parent, Itachi tells himself in no uncertain terms that he is being ridiculous. Sasuke is never afraid, not even faced with a demon god which froze Itachi through and through with sheer awed terror.

_This is not the time_.

He tries to think, assimilate; analyze the situation. Sasuke is difficult, but Itachi is a genius, has studied the subject for nine intense years. Viewing something with dispassionate focus (like you look at people you are going to kill, refusing to see them as persons, simply evaluating stance and size and strengths) he must acknowledge that Sasuke is, to a large extent, living in a post-accomplishment world. It hurts to think this, but pain is necessary, clarifying.

The facts are known to him, the motivating forces of Sasuke's existence: avenge and restore the clan. He has heard, too, Orochimaru's old motto: _I like to see things moving._

He knows just enough about psychology to be aware that the amalgam that is his parent, born from those two dead separate people whom he has never met, was created to cope.

What is there that needs to be dealt with now?

…yes, Itachi acknowledges, forcing himself into stark neutrality. That would be Naruto.

Naruto who does not age, Naruto whose eyes are growing redder, Naruto who has – on some fundamental level – been recognized as necessary.

(he heard, once, that orochimaru sought _the forever jutsu_)

(forever isn't a concept that could ever be real to sasuke, leading a life measured out in death; who has mastered death, seen through it with the accursed eyes of lost gods)

"I," Itachi says, worn thin, tired and tense; only just returned from a mission and more shocked than perhaps he should be. Words aren't – aren't the right tools for this.

He considers; I am nine years old and there is something I want.

Sasuke has held him; Sasuke has hit him. Itachi thinks he might possibly be entitled.

He inches forward with what should be stealth but becomes sheer bloody-mindedness, holds his breath and practically scrambles towards his goal, slapping short graceless arms around Sasuke's waist.

This was a bad idea, he realizes, feeling the wetness of what can really only be blood under his palms. He still can't bring himself to move away, just buries his nose in the dirty shirt and clings helplessly.

The one thing I have wanted, all my life. Just you.

A hand closes over his shoulder, just hard enough to hurt, in what could be reluctance or reciprocation. Either way it's very obviously restrained; they're back to the Sakura-san way of touching. Itachi draws a deep breath and is insulted and disappointed and a little relieved.

"Tomorrow," Sasuke says evenly, "I will teach you the sealing techniques. Conserve your chakra."

Itachi nods, breathes in deeply again; releases his grip, steps back, embarrassed and guilty. His hands are wet with Sasuke's blood, and something slimy and dark that might be burnt skin clings to his fingertips.

"Would you," he starts cautiously, staring at the swollen, blood-streaked face, "would you like me to heal you?"

And it burns. Itachi isn't just a child anymore, he's becoming a person.

"Alright," Sasuke says tonelessly. He's too upset to manage the fine-tuned control necessary, and the scratches where Naruto's claws stripped skin off his body ache fiercely. More importantly, appearing in public with what amounts to a black eye and a fat lip wouldn't be a particularly intelligent course of action.

Itachi reaches up to lay a cold hand against his face. Healing has never been the focus of his training, but he would be hard pressed to worsen things.

"Right," Sasuke says when Itachi bites his lip and steps back.

This is – not a good time.

_And he is my child, my baby boy, but that doesn't make anything easier, it makes everything worse._

Reality is an ongoing blur of senseless horror, spinning madly and painfully out of control, and you have to cling to it; and sometimes he wouldn't mind letting go, but if he did there would be no one standing protectively in the way, and–

I'm on top of it, he tells himself, and he is so tired of all this sick shit that it doesn't matter how he can't believe in it. Life's a bitch and then you die – fine, alright. I'll bitch right back.

He is aware he has been insane for years. No crazy, just – disassociated from reality. Slipping between the layers of it and of himself, sometimes lost between them. It happens that the world stays red and fractured after he's deactivated the blood-bought eyes; and siren voices scream at him; death whispers of its mysteries and he flails on the edge, perched over the eternity glimpsed beyond mundane constraints on the days when mortality becomes laughable. Abstract becomes material, changes places, he walks through dark dreams in the waking hours and lives a thousand pasts and future in his sleep.

I need to pull myself together.

The world is mad, but he finds purchase at the edge of his thoughts, brings the spinning, like the wheels of the Mangekyou, to a stop. Finds the scratches and the splinters he has lost, sticks them to rationality, forces a tenuous, half-unwanted control.

Hell is in his mind, and Heaven is glimpsed sometimes too, between dust moths caught in sunlight, suspended like picture frames of memory and abandoned hope: _you will lose everything you do not let go of._

He clings only to the most essential, to that which is instinct more than want.

"Sasuke?"

The world spreads its wings, and he could laugh it to scorn, feels the burn along the wing-scars, where Naruto clawed.

Naruto. Jesus Christ. _Itachi._

Nine years, going on ten, since he slipped out of my body. Fell from my fingers like sand, water dripping through, but I must drink, it is a desert, burning.

Sasuke had survived a massacre at that age, had lost everything but his life. The first cracks had appeared, redness in the darkness between the layers of the world. He glimpsed it (skittish, fascinated; the stuff of which the tsukiyomi is crafted, it puts you in one of the little portions of that darkness, in the world's shadow core).

Itachi has had little to lose; has been a Jounin for some time, blood on his hands, blood in his eyes.

Sasuke is aware, with resentment that has grown into a familiar appreciation (you learn to like what you must stand: survival measure) that he will never be an adult. Didn't finish childhood; the part of him that had a childhood died with the others, with its love, on Massacre Night.

He isn't adult, isn't a child; human? Yeah, I think.

Itachi too is neither a child nor an adult.

Itachi who was left inside him by a dead man, dead by his hands, caressed by his hands. Itachi who kicked under his heart, forced his way out of his womb, into the heart he doesn't want. Itachi with whom he has always been painfully _careful_: I know I am not – trustworthy.

For he is aware he lacks the basic mental limitations, the ones that would stop Sakura before she did anything unforgivable, that would stop even Kakashi before he broke something that can't be mended.

This is why Sasuke has never hit him (once i start i don't stop). He's never raised hand against Sakura either, nor Kakashi, not seriously (or did i?). There's just Naruto.

This is why he has always hesitated touching Itachi. I'm not even sure what the limits are, how could I be certain I do not cross them, break them? And he is quite well aware of how it feels to have an authority figure get a little too close for comfort, a trusted touch you shouldn't allow but can't question. Slipping past your clothes, your mind slipping further away, into the darkness between reality and its shadows.

He starts walking. The world sways with his movement, but he is at home now in the strangeness. Better because he's worse, compensating for the craziness. Treat the symptoms, the disease is too deeply rooted.

Their house is halfway gone, courtesy of a Katon Gokakyu no Jutsu Naruto avoided with a heavy kind of haste, but there's enough left for him to wash the blood off his face and change into a whole shirt. Itachi takes in the destruction with wide eyes, without comment.

Sasuke uses the word _home_ like atheists say _god_ – does it have meaning? Yes. Does it have an actual reference? No. It's de jure, not de facto.

Itachi might be different. Itachi might still believe.

"We need to go," Sasuke says. He could stay forever; this is his place, he will take the hands reaching up through the grave-soil for him. But he cannot stand the thought of Itachi stranded here another moment.

Fast and blurred, the walk through the village, but reality clears. Brightness and colors and certain lines, and he might perceive that there are hidden depths underneath them, but the surface is brittle and garish. He focuses on it as they enter the Hokage Tower.

"Wait outside," he tells Itachi, stepping past the impatient and clearly harassed guards into Tsunade's office (_my blond girl_, he doesn't think, _my beautiful brave blond girl, and i broke your heart, didn't i_).

"Took your sweet time, Uchiha. Do you need me to heal you?"

"Hardly."

She gives him a hard, expectant look.

He is all here, now, brought back from the outside of life and into the present tense.

His eyes are aching fiercely, and for a moment he seriously contemplates refusing to fold on principle alone, but shortly decides he cannot be bothered: will not allow this stupid aging woman living in a past he can't even properly remember (except when i live it again) such power over him that he should need censure himself in front of her.

(_you're so childish, sasuke-kun_)

It's starker than he intended it, and bleaker, his report. You could say it's lost, sure words in a world suddenly uncertain.

"Naruto's gone to Sand.

"On my authority. I saved us both a lot of trouble with that one.

"I'd have liked to see you try keeping him here.

"Like I'd let him.

"Sent a squad with him.

"Does it matter whom he represents? Gaara's head over heels for him, it'll work out fine.

"I don't care whoever the hell he fucks.

"Yeah. We'll have to seal him up good when he returns.

"I will. Obviously.

"Stay the fuck out of our business.

"Later."

When he walks out, spine metal-straight and screaming, stupid pride and telling himself (knowing, trying to care) that it doesn't matter how she's laughing at him.

Better she's doing that than crying over Naruto, because then–

He hasn't cried since before Massacre Night (or was there once? no, a dream?). I don't remember how.

He finds the guards dismissed and Itachi sitting on the ground, curled gratefully around his four-year-old sister, smiling eager and scarred at her uncoordinated poking, her fat hands slapping against his neck, a babyish finger touching just a little too hard at the cheek Sasuke hit.

Sakura is standing over them, arms crossed over her chest, a very motherly expression on her face – concerned, exasperated, sternly loving.

"Sasuke." Her evaluation is brief and won't find anything; there are blistering aches all over his body, but his mind is clouded, thought distant and slippery.

(_i love you_)

"Let's go," she says softly, wisely not reaching for him.

"I'm in no mood to humor your girlfriend or your parents," Sasuke tells her evenly. "Our house is rather ruined, as well."

"I take it you were going to break into Kakashi's apartment, then?" Her little smile is mild, knowing.

"You could say that."

"I have no real problem with that." Condescension and care intertwine and lace her words. "Rina and Itachi seem so comfortable together, it'd be a shame to separate them. Come, now."

Itachi gives the outside wall of Kakashi's building a look as though he's estimating he'll probably be the one to scale it and enter through a window, but it isn't necessary. Sasuke knows from long experience that the place is sloppily warded; that there's nothing in it worth protecting, really. He kicks in the door and ducks the barrel of kunai, is careful not to step on the exploding tags littering the hallway floor. Rina's still carried by Itachi and thus not a problem, and everyone else has been through Avoiding Obvious Traps 101.

Rina stares around the room with big eyes, has never been here before and seems set to stumble around exploring when Itachi cautiously puts her down.

"Hey," her brother interrupts, catching her hand in his own. "Not the kind of books you should try to read. Let's have your nap in the other room instead." He indulgently picks her up again when she raises her arms in clear appeal, departs with a nod towards the adults.

Yes, Sakura thinks. My parents are right. He's creepily well brought up.

She doesn't think he's afraid of Sasuke, all the same.

Frankly she has a hard time picturing Uchiha Itachi frightened of anything in the world, which might be part of the reason everyone else is so scared of him.

Sometimes she is a little worried Rina will lack motivation to learn to defend herself since the standard threat (_my big brother will beat you up if you pick on me_) must be so incredibly effective in her case.

She has bigger problems on hand. Turns towards them, watching the white face and the listless gaze.

xxxxxxxxxx


	47. No One's Baby

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 47:**

"**No One's Baby"**

She sits on a kitchen chair, watching Sasuke sink carefully down onto the miniscule couch. He still makes modern furniture look absolutely out of place, even though she knows the Uchiha household has occasionally featured some, when Naruto's been the one to replace the broken stuff.

"I wish Kakashi were here," she says helplessly. Didn't intent to, but the sentence spilled into vocalization before conscious thought could restrain it.

Oh, how she wishes it, with Sasuke worn and raw, crazy enough for honest gallows humor to slip through the battered walls caging his emotions and his sanity.

"So Itachi and I could fight over who'd get to cry on his shoulder?" he asks with what could have been wryness, if he hadn't been so tired. It's hard to pull off irony with a body aching all the way from the soils of your feet to the top of your head.

He is beat up inside-out.

She isn't going to touch that, just now. Does know Kakashi is the steady adult figure for Sasuke and Itachi both, regardless of different generations and Sasuke's old affair with the man, the strange particular tenderness that lingers (and maybe he's still sleeping with him, what do i know, and there is memory sharp as death, for both of them).

"I can't believe you fought in the Compound," she says instead, and it's true she's astonished.

He shrugs, a jarring little movement.

I would not die for you, he thinks. And because of that a lot of things are alright, and he's so tired. So what if she hears things she shouldn't, he can stop her using them against him.

"It's this big dead weight," he says, toneless words slipping free without thought. He can't desecrate it, the memorial over his family and his failure, the manacle anchoring him to the world and to his identity as Uchiha Sasuke. He hasn't rebuilt anything, though, not a single one of the houses Naruto torched all those years ago – Stockholm Syndrome aside, only an idiot helps lock the chain around his own ankle.

She decides to try a different tangent, playing with the edge of her dress. "Itachi-kun is so – big." Not the word she's looking for, but the closest she could find to express the concept she wanted: an old man in a child's body yet not a proper adult, with greatness inherent, a great presence: not the volatile, demanding one of Sasuke or Naruto but a steady, unquenchable, more reliable sort of charisma. He's never needed to fight to be recognized.

An alien child looking down his nose at everyone even though she's never seen anyone shorter than he who isn't several years younger. He looks like his grandmother, like both his parents – the perfect Uchiha specimen, delicate and pretty, insanely lethal.

Which does lead to another, much less pleasant train of thought. Bad, but still better than what they should really be discussing, so here goes.

"I'm a little worried about him sometimes," she admits. "He's been treated so much like a grown-up, and he's – incest doesn't usually make for stabile minds, and his father was bad enough without that."

"He's the alleged descendant of the elder gods," Sasuke says dryly. She's never actually been certain whether he believes in that (nor whether she does). "I'd think his genes can cope with a little inbreeding."

"You try with him," she says, can't read the dark look that might be annoyed or just weary, isn't sure whether he even understands what she's trying to communicate; and she continues, clarifies, softly now, "You don't with Rina."

He makes an impatient gesture which, she thinks with what could have been a grin in lighter circumstances, he has probably picked up from Naruto. "She has family enough without my interference."

"You …consider her Naruto's? I mean, Itachi is so emphatically yours."

"Naruto wanted her," Sasuke says. "I didn't mind." His face takes on a funny expression; she believes he is thinking about his brother. "It's mostly up to the child, you know? She doesn't much like me. Naruto would have liked to be Itachi's parent, but if Itachi weren't mine he'd only be Kakashi's." He looks faintly disgusted as he adds, "Or Neji's."

"I've wondered – that is, she has my last name. You haven't…"

"If she is an Uchiha, there's nothing that can make her not be an Uchiha. If she isn't, there isn't anything in the world that can make her one."

Haruno Rina. Uchiha Rina. Yes, there would be a world of difference.

"Of course," she says, mildly. "I think it's for the best." She tries a smile. "It's just my parents freaking out a little about the whole out of wedlock bit."

His eyes are even and serious. "I said I'd marry you if you want. I stand by my word on that."

"I don't want to marry you," she says, harsher than she intended. "Absolutely not. It'd be my death."

There's actual anger in his face, for the first time, something almost hurt, uncommon frustration leaking through. "I'd never hurt you, not ever. Neither would Naruto. How can you not know that?!"

She drags her legs up, locks her arms around her knees. "Do you remember that fight you and Naruto had on the hospital roof, after the mess with Gaara? I tried to stop you, I tried to exist between you, be part of your bond. Were you even aware I was there?"

"I – no." It hurts to hear it spoken, seems to hurt him to say it as well. "There was just – it had to be him. For that one moment, the two of us were all there was." Then, bewildered, wondering: "Even my brother didn't exist."

"I thought as much. You know, I asked Naruto, once. When you were gone and he was the only one too slow to realize I wasn't the teammate he was head over heels for. He said you were all he could be aware of. Said it like it wasn't strange, like that was how he lived much of his life. Everything else was just background noise, in the way."

It hurt when he said it too, of course, but not enough to justify throwing this at Sasuke. He looks thoughtful, with the careful blankness he assumes when you've cut deeply, cut him badly.

"Hey," she says, and thinks of him as a child, and hers, and god he is, in too many ways. She crosses the floor of the small kitchen, feeling like she's traversing a much longer, more perilous distance. "Kakashi's not here, but how about having a good cry on my shoulder instead?"

He seems almost bemused. "It was just a figure of speech, Sakura. I don't even know how to."

"Time I teach you, then. Here." She sits down next to his curled form, drapes herself across him, one hand finding the back of his head and pressing it to her chest. He's pliant, only a little tense. She arranges them as best she can, until they're sitting closely and holding on clumsily, like they don't understand how they can fit together.

"Now," she says at last, rubbing his back, stroking his hair, "you let the sad thing form, and you let it out so it doesn't cling to you anymore, can't drag you down. Just go with it."

Nothing happens. The tendons of his neck are tense under her palm.

"Naruto's gone. You've fought. Hey, no thightening the grip. You can't fight it out with me, you can't scream. Try the normal approach; for the novelty value, huh? Think back, I'm sure you cried when you were little. If the kids hear they'll think it's me, don't worry."

He's done worse, has done far worse than this for the people he cares for. For Sakura, I will try.

Tentative, hesitant, until the shaking and the sobs gain momentum, sounds and hands raw on her. His entire body trembles, sharp choked noises explode against her chest.

At first she's relived, a little satisfied. It's so abnormal and adorable. Then it just goes on and on, and she starts being worried, and impotent, aching around his form pressed to her, much too hard.

She's caressing the nape of his neck, up and down and up and down, slow and steady, contrast to his panted sniffs, has probably been frozen in this muted, Sasuke-crying hell for – oh, eternity; half an hour? when he stops, easing out of it gradually, deliberately. The sobs soften, the shaking stabilizes.

It leaves him feeling out of breath and puffy around the eyes.

"I think I'm done," he says, voice steadier than it should have been, low and serious. "Is that all there is to it?"

"Yes," she admits ruefully, still stroking. Dare she hope? "Did it help?"

"I don't – how's it supposed to help, exactly?"

"What's the saying… 'If you have to ask…'?"

"He's still – it doesn't change anything." Shift, but still close, still a little too rough. "I'm going to handle it."

"I want to help," she says helplessly.

Naruto would have insisted: _you do_. Sasuke's still clinging to her, which might amount to the same thing.

For the first time she's glad there's a bit of Orochimaru in him, something to teach him to touch again, in affection of a kind, however tainted.

xxxxx

"Alright," Naruto says. "We don't know what to expect, so stay on alert. Okay, guys? We're going in!"

On the one hand it is very cool to be in a position to deliver pseudo-speeches uninterrupted and un-mocked. On the other he'd have gotten to the desert much faster if he hadn't had to slow down so the squad could keep up. Aiwa's pretty fast, good solid fighter though getting a little old, as are the other regular ninja, but the trice-damned healer, the tracker and the summoner consistently drag down the pace. He considered leaving them behind, but then he would've as good as killed them – either the slow ones follow them and get picked off by the rebels, or they're sent home and his squad dies because there's no one to heal them.

Shit. Suddenly he's glad he's never been in the running for a Council seat. Someone suggested it once, and Sound as a whole might have accepted him on basis of his ass-kicking ability, but Sasuke flat-out refused, and well, Naruto could sort of see his point. 'Sides, making domestic fights public issues is not a tempting option, and they inevitably would have. Oh yes, we would (worse than they already do, but don't think about that, unfist your paw).

Domestic – oh fuck, he didn't even say goodbye to Rina. He leaves often enough without doing so, but not when he's anticipating being gone for a good long while. Like now.

He didn't exactly part with Sasuke on good terms either, but he's too angry still to be regretful. Resentment burns along with his seal, half broken again and unrestricted.

(the whisker marks on my cheek are an inch deep each)

He hasn't seen Gaara in what feels like forever, not since that seemed-horrible-but-was-pretty-cool-all-things-considered Chuunin Exam they both failed so spectacularly. Ashamed to admit it or not (and mostly not, if he's honest) Sasuke's departure overshadowed everything else for so long and so completely that Naruto had rather forgotten about the entire business with Sand.

Now I'm here though, and I'm fixing this.

(he has to)

Except, alright, he isn't sure exactly what or how much there is that needs fixing. Took off in kind of a hurry, after having been willfully kept in the dark for years. Aided by his interrogation of Aiwa, snatches of memory add up to his belief that the Sand Civil War has been raging, in varying degree, for almost ten years. Eight, or thereabout.

"Makoto," he says. "You know what to do."

The tracker nods shortly, rather more deeply than Naruto is used to. Then, he's not exactly used to being addressed as –_sama_, either.

('you know how to track a jinchuuriki?'

'yes, sir. feel it once, can tell again. i'll find him for you, no problem')

Naruto is glad, once they're a couple days into the desert, that Aiwa's seasoned, used to eccentric people who are leaders because they kick ass and not because they actually make for good team leaders. The elder Sound shinobi is the one who keeps them together, sets the pace and decides when to rest. He commands the squad when they stumble into battle and have no idea whether their opponents are on their side or not.

"Hey," Naruto says, Kyuubi's chakra blazing around him, almost blinding him, fighting tooth and nail for control. "We've won, alright? So stop." He lifts the guy whose robe he's fisting a little higher. "You – tell whomever you're working for that Uzumaki Naruto's here and looking for Gaara, yeah?"

He watches the man scramble away, watches him get lost among the endless dynes of sand. It's the first time he can remember anyone's managed to sneak up on him.

"What about the others, sir?" Aiwa asks him, gesturing towards two apprehended Sand ninja.

"Ah, I, uh…" Shit, I haven't decided. They aren't in circumstances where they can bloody well keep prisoners, and letting them go would be so goddamn stupid, but he doesn't want to be the kind of person who kills in cold blood because it's fucking practical.

"Our standard order would be to execute them, after we've extracted what information we can," Aiwa says, his tone leaving not hint about whatever personal opinions he might have on the subject.

"No torture," Naruto stipulates shortly through the tightening of his throat. "Just kill them, no pain. We'll leave the bodies as fair warning."

Kyuubi understands the concept of playing with your kills frighteningly well, and the red pleasure is bleeding into Naruto's mind. He looks away into the darkening desert, tries not to think that the crimson light from the setting sun looks like blood.

That evening he tosses, turns, feverishly overheated under the thin blanket in the icy desert night, overwhelmed by sickness. Panicked nausea holds him by the scruff of his neck until he scrambles up on his hands and knees and vomits, acid lingering behind his teeth.

I've never order someone else to kill for me before.

He doesn't again, not like that. If there are several people to be killed he handles one of them, if there's just one he prefers not to skirt responsibility.

He hates feeling a hypocrite, won't kill by fucking proxy, and Kyuubi screams bloody murder if It's only allowed to watch the carnage.

Sasuke once lead a mission Naruto stumbled over on his way home from a different assignment, and the image is etched onto his closed eyes, into his mind: a large, traditional house, fallen bodies littering the floor, Sound ninja crouching over them. Sasuke, elegant and sinister, red eyes locked on Naruto's as he slits a man's throat with a sweeping motion so perfected it becomes nonchalant. The entire scene an evening study in black and white, with muted screams for background noise, and Sasuke looking a freaking grim reaper, connected to the living world through killing alone.

It left Naruto so hard he could barely breathe, but – _I don't want to be like that._

That's not – that's not Naruto. He had dreams of protecting people, of being loved instead of feared, and he isn't willing to just give up on them.

He keeps those memory-dreams there, safe in the core of him, but deep inside him there's Kyuubi as well, a tidal wave of ancient instinct. And the desert certainly fuels it.

They fight for weeks before they find Gaara, slow eternal weeks of punishing heat and freezing cold, ambushes that should be impossible, gore smeared all over him.

No one's speaking to them; he isn't sure why. Breaks a man's neck with his bare hands, and it's the first time he's ever done that but the move seems sickeningly familiar, a comfort almost: the rough skin under his fingers and palms, slick with perspiration, the longer hair at the nape of the neck tickling him. Grab, feel the pulse explode in the meat you're holding, then just twist, and snap! he's dead.

Someone should have bloody told Gaara by now, shouldn't they? Maybe Gaara's dead, or maybe Ichibi has taken over, Gaara's holed up somewhere, beyond human reach.

The trick is not to think.

Just breathe, eat, kill, shit, sleep. Go through the motions anchored in physicality, let your body take over, the basic parts that can't be eroded down by primitive circumstances.

He looks at the stars at night. They're brighter and farther away, with no trees reaching for them.

Mine, he wants to think, but though possessiveness comes to him easily, ownership of a star is a more abstract concept than he can readily handle anymore.

He thinks of his precious people, Rina-love, Sakura-chan, Kakashi, Itachi, Iruka-sensei, Jiraiya, Tsunade, Konohamaru, his friends.

Only then there's Sasuke, at the beginning and in the end there's Sasuke, and the anger's still there, right along with the regret, the love and confusion and terminal aching tenderness that sometimes makes him lash out.

Forget the things you can't touch.

Did the seal always burn on his stomach? Was it always this dull, terrifying agony blazing constantly through him?

He doesn't think so much; there's little meaning to thought in this red-tinted, angling-the-wrong-way world.

One day, after the sun has burned the enemy blood into a crackling mask covering most of his face, he fucks the healer.

She's terrified and soft, smells of fear, and he tries to mumbles something reassuring into her ear. Hey, okay, we can stop.

The growl vibrates against her neck, and she becomes abruptly lax, lying back, obediently parting her legs around him.

And, however blurry, it is distinct, the idea that if someone doesn't want you they hit you.

A kick or a curse spat in his face, a knee between his thighs – he'd have broken the arm he's holding, snarled something; and backed off.

After all, he's not into violating people. Sure, Kyuubi might not always see the difference, but Naruto's aware there is one, and sure, Kyuubi might be as fucked up as Sasuke when it comes to using sex as blackmail, fight, domination, bribe, distraction, what-the-fuck-ever, but… Maybe there isn't a but.

Hell, he's never slept with anyone but Sasuke (yeah, sakura-chan, but that wasn't about sex and besides sasuke was along for the ride), how the fuck should I know?

Maybe it's unforgivable to punch your partner just before they enter you, maybe it's unforgivable to hiss at them to shut up and wrestle them down, maybe it's unforgivable that Naruto should be fucking grateful Sasuke doesn't mind taking it frequently and roughly, the way Kyuubi's been affecting him when he lets loose control.

Probably Sakura-chan would not consider it a good thing for him to bite at her neck, teeth trembling into the thin white skin of her throat, and hiss, you're mine you're _mine_ asshole. Probably she wouldn't think it'd be okay for him to fuck her dry until she screams and bleeds, and be faintly satisfied about putting his mark there even as there's sheepish guilt and concern.

Probably Sasuke has to be very, very fucked up to accept, much less occasionally encourage, this behavior.

How the hell should I know?

He does know he should care, but that doesn't much help.

The healer's acting completely weird afterwards, crying about demons and shaking. Naruto tries to comfort her but only makes it worse, so ends up dumping her back with Aiwa and the others. He can't see she gets much better, but she takes care to stay away from him so maybe he just doesn't notice. She's alive, at least, and reasonably fine (see there, asshat!). She can even run without much trouble two days later.

Since it is painfully evident Makoto the tracer grandstanded like all hell way back in the beginning, they have to resort to other measures: they're not going to find Gaara like this, and they've been here …what? months? …and they still aren't even sure who they're fighting. It seems to vary from day to day.

If we stay here we will be driven mad.

"Hey, summoner," he says. Naruto doesn't even fucking know his name. He learned the names of the three fighters they lost after they'd died. Before that it had seemed pointless, and he still can't bring himself to care about what the living ones call themselves. "Can you summon dogs?"

"Yes, Naruto-sama. Since Kakashi-sama is the Dog Master they will obey his call first, but if he's not utilizing them… yes, absolutely."

"Great. Get Pakkun here."

Pakkun doesn't recognize him.

Naruto laughs and laughs, curling cramping around the seal that burnsburns_burns_. Reality check, oh yeah, like whoa. Feels like a good solid kick in the face.

What the fuck am I doing?

What the hell have I done?

I'm fighting a war, I'm trying. I'm failing.

That's changing now.

Or so he hopes, so he decides.

They do find Gaara, at last.

With the healer (mia? mika? whatever), the summoner, Aiwa and one of the fighters in tow, Naruto is escorted into a fairly large grotto, cleverly hidden behind several meters of compact sand. Getting in requires advanced ninjutsu, dispelling of several genjutsu and a seemingly endless exchange of passwords, but finally they are here.

"Hey," Naruto says, shaking a persistent no-name Sand guy off of him. The guy grumbles but obeys, keeps his distance.

Touching me is a bad idea, now.

(don't think about the healer, _don't_, and don't think about sasuke, _fuck no_)

Gaara's sitting on some kind of gilded chair in the far back of the cave with a skeletal, middle-aged man leaning forward over his shoulder.

"Naruto." Gaara's mouth shapes the word, but it's the other guy who speaks. Up closer, when he sees the nearby puppet, Naruto recognizes Gaara's older brother with something akin to shock. His muddled brain tries dizzily to process: Gaara hasn't aged a day, looks exactly like he did at twelve, maybe a little thinner, a little more tanned. His brother, without the makeup, has lost an ear and gained a thick scar crawling across his worn, heavily wrinkled face. His nose has obviously been broken and then healed wrong; he lacks a few teeth.

"How's my sister?" he asks, and Naruto belatedly remembers that yeah, Temari…

God. _Leaf._

"Good," he replies. "She's good. Itching to come back and help you guys, but… She and Shikamaru has a kid, now. A little girl. Sara."

The soft, relieved smile looks obscenely out of place on Kankurou's deformed face.

"Come over here," he says, gesturing, and oh shit, he's missing fingers too. "Let's talk everything over."

"Naruto-sama?" Aiwa asks in a very quiet, rather alarmed voice. "Should I…?"

He nods a yeah, sure, and the man follows him into an inner room, which is really just an extension of the original cave around which some shutters have been erected.

"Gaara!" Naruto exclaims when they're all sitting down, he and Aiwa, Gaara, the brother, the half-masked older man he also sort of vaguely recalls and a very old lady. "Hey, we were looking for you forever, I was going mental with–"

– _well I was going to say "worry", but truthfully, at this point I'm just sick of everything, I've given up on this hoping 'till the end shit_.

He was just stubborn.

"Naruto," Gaara says, in a slow dreamy way.

He was not aware he had slipped into another dream, but he must have. Should try and snap out of it, but reality is not very pleasant.

He perfected the art of dreaming while awake many years ago, and it has served him faithfully ever since. Mother lulls him to sleep with whispered promises of gruesome, fascinating nightmares, and sometimes, sometimes, a glimpse of something _better._

(naruto)

_Rescue me_, he used to try and tell everyone he met when he was little. Before Naruto showed him he could save himself, that there were people who'd let him do that.

"Sit down," Kankurou offers, and there's a sound like a twig snapping.

Shit. Jesus Christ. It's real.

"_Naruto_," Gaara says, and if you know him very well you can tell that that's a smile, that creepy, cautious expression on his face.

He does not listen as his brother briefs the newcomers. He's listening for Naruto's voice.

Watches Naruto's face, which hasn't aged properly either, with the eyes that have gone a dully feverish hue and the whisker scars that are so dominant now, like claws over the inverted cheeks. He might not have aged, but he does not look particularly young, far from the wholesome childish visage he once presented to the world.

"Akatsuki?" he repeats now, echoing something Kankurou's said.

"Yes," the elder Kazekage sibling says, grinning a little, grimly, and rubbing at the ruin of his nose. "Three or four of them turned up in the desert a few months back. They went away pretty soon; there's no one to fight here, not properly. Gaara killed two of them, but not until they'd put an impressive fucker of a seal on Shikaku. It's funny, actually – we've been trying to do that for years, so it turns out the assholes might well have saved us all."

Naruto's corresponding grin is feral: vicious and brilliant.

"Now," Kankurou sobers. "I am, of course, unspeakably happy you are here, a feeling that I am certain all present share, but I had understood Leaf intended to stay out of the conflict…?"

Naruto nods, a ridiculously sage-ish movement. "Yeah," he agrees with an undecipherable gesture, rough tanned hands with no fat to soften the prominent bones, muscles curling like worms around the large knuckles. "Tsunade still thinks that's the smartest. I had Sasuke authorize it." He nods towards his companions. "Aiwa here's from Sound."

"Sound?" the old lady rasps. "Explain."

Naruto closes his eyes for a moment, summoning what little skill he has with words and patience. He knew this was coming, should have known. Gives, with frequent and much-blessed interruptions from Aiwa, some approximation of an explanation of the current situation.

Approximation being the imperative word: yeah, Orochimaru's dead, yeah, Sasuke killed him. Uh, exactly, Uchiha Sasuke. Returned to the village almost a decade ago with his brother and Orochimaru both dead, he'd achieved the Mangekyou. You've heard? Yeah,'s all true. And then about a year later we picked up the remnants of Sound, they're situated just outside Leaf now, it's kind of halfway two, halfway one village. Sound's governed by a council and Sasuke.

Aiwa's sensible enough to refrain from ever referring to his boss as _Orochimaru-sama_ (and yes, it still creeps naruto out how readily sasuke answers to that, but don't think about sasuke in public, remember) and neither of them even hints at the whole merging thing. Wouldn't go over so well, mildly put.

"Huh," Kankurou says at last, thoughtfully. "Well I've never been a fan of Uchiha's, but… Look, Temari said, long ago, and – are you still living with him?"

"Yes," he whispers, hoarse. Stricken, for some reason. "Yeah, I am."

"Alright, then. I'll trust you to trust him."

And Naruto feels sick and miserable and doesn't mention that personally he doesn't trust Sasuke at all.

xxxxxxxxxx


	48. Rescue Me

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 48:**

"**Rescue Me"**

You'd think it'd be easier once they'd found Gaara, but no dice. At least with missions, no matter how grisly and complicated, there's a certain objective to be achieved. You know what you're after, and can go home when you've gotten it, when you're done.

A war is so much more than that. It's like a million really bad missions, ranking from the plain silly to the murderously hateful to the tediously exhausting, a million missions that so very many people from different factions somehow have to work together to accomplish.

It's rather obvious that Kankurou's the brain of the operation, and Naruto is happy to let him be. His own mind feels fractured, fizzled.

Aiwa seems to get along fairly well with the Sand planners, which might be good. The summoner's been killed, along with the tracker and five of the fighters.

The night before they storm the village Naruto fucks the healer again.

He thinks of Sasuke when he does it, but not _like that._

I used to have this connection to Gaara, this whole, he's what I would have been, if not…

But now Naruto looks at him, and can't see there's really that much of a difference.

He could think he'd been rescued from that lonely bitter hell of self-hatred, back when he was still convinced Sasuke would always be with him, when he still believed Sakura-chan and he could rescue their darling from himself.

But Sasuke wanted to save himself, and couldn't.

Naruto grabbed for the things Gaara had abandoned all hope of getting, and then they slipped from his grasp, and _you're no better, are you, Naruto, stop pretending already, it's getting sad._

The girl's crying softly, silently, and her eyes are like Sakura-chan's so that's horrible.

"Don't," Naruto says, and wipes a tear from her cheek. He's clumsy about it, and his hands are larger than he's used to and clawed: his touch leaves her face white with fear under a sheen of blood. "Sorry," he tries, but it comes up all wrong, and her eyes are closed, leaving that pale skin and that black hair, and fuck, like she's the only one who has reason to cry. "Shut up. Hey, _shut the hell up!_"

She does.

"I didn't mean for it to end up like this," he confides afterwards, and no, it's no just she who has teary reddened eyes and a wavering voice. Kyuubi is pounding through his skull, pouring red pain over the memories of glimmering dreams, of _maybe it'll be better, maybe we can make ourselves a happy ending_.

It's so fucking easy to break dreams that sometimes he has to wonder why reality even bothers, not like it's a challenge or anything.

(as easy as breaking a heart, goddammit, and people can do that before they've learned their own names)

He's drunk on power, riding the edge of adrenaline trying to mask terror, can't eat, dreams when awake, and cries, now. Big hulking ugly sounds, the taste of snot clinging to his chapped lips.

Scrambling into a kneeling position and slumping over into a sitting one, he discovers her wrists are broken; he's been holding them pinned down above her head the way Sasuke never ever lets him (he has the mean, shied-away-from suspicion it's what orochimaru used to do, though has never been masochistic/sadistic enough to find out).

"Shit," he mutters. "Shit, I never meant…"

Only he did, once and again, just not with her.

"Here, come on, don't cry, we're getting help, I'm _sorry_." He scoops her up, watches a slice of crying green eye (sakura-chan's eye, no no) and hurries back towards the camp, belatedly doing up his clothes as best as he's able. "Look, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, would you _shut up_."

Aiwa is there fairly quickly and appropriates the girl without comment, taking a few steps into shadow and dumping her on someone else.

"Take good care of her," Naruto calls, in a hoarse, sullen voice, sees the outline of a nod.

"Naruto-sama," Aiwa says carefully. He's a brave man, in his own way. "Please be aware that I fully understand it is not my business, and forgive my presumption, but I – there has been some worry, amongst Sound and Sand both, regarding these… incidents."

"I'm not," Naruto tries weakly, wanting to clutch at his head, hinder it from exploding (at least the pain's distracting me from the girl, oh god, oh _god_). "Speak frankly."

"Sir." The man clearly steels himself, gives a look around like he's sampling the world for potentially the last time. A Sound ninja does not argue with his superiors – stabs them in the back, sure, but he isn't rude to their face, ever. "If it were me, I'd hardly appreciate my boyfriend screwing my subordinates into hospitalization."

"Trust me," and a weak, hollow laugh rasps past his throat. The situation is suddenly freaking _hilarious_, and he's crying again, or almost. "I promise you, and this grieves me deeply, Sasuke doesn't care."

He has a sudden crazy vision, like a film flash, like he's acting in a movie:

He's in a white room, a sterile hospital room – or is it a morgue? There's Sakura-chan, solemn and beautiful, all in white as well, standing over a bier.

A sheet covers something lying on it, and she rips it away, revealing the healer girl, naked on her back, staring blankly into the ceiling, with cuts and bruises like an impressionist painting over her dead skin.

"Oh my god," Sakura-chan breathes. "Who did this?"

"Naruto," another voice says, and Gaara walks in, the strange mellow introvert Gaara who has replaced the eternally screaming child that existed years ago. "It was an unpleasant sight, watching him go mad in the desert." He shakes his head sadly, sagely. "I did many bad things under the influence of my demon, but I must confess I… never got so up close and personal with my victims."

"Are you saying he…" she clearly cannot go on without several deep intakes of breath, whispers the word like the mere syllables could hurt her, "….vi-violated her?"

"Not her," a new voice says, and god, of course Sasuke has to be here. "Like she'd be stupid enough to fight back."

"But then why?" Sakura-chan begs hopelessly. "If she were fighting I'd understand – I mean it'd be unforgivable but I'd _understand_. If she didn't, then why did he, why did he…?" She gestures towards the marks, does not look at them.

Sasuke's smirk is gloating, in a sterilized, removed fashion. "Because he likes to, the sick fuck." His fingers stroke contemplatively up his neck, smooth now, _like it wasn't before_. He grins, spectacularly beautiful, like you can only appreciate on things you are about to lose. "Sometimes I like him to, because I can't love him, I can't stand the thought, and this reminds me it's not about that."

"Yes it is," Naruto wants to say, and also: "No I bloody well _don't_", but he can't speak.

And abruptly, still gagging on his own thick (hypocritical, oh yes i know) horror, he is back in the desert and staring at Aiwa.

"He won't care," he repeats, and wishes with all his soul Sasuke will be furious, and _cry_, and then forgive me, oh god.

Not that Naruto himself has ever truly forgiven Sasuke, not quite, and that mutual guilt – he isn't sure he could stand to discard it, even if it were possible. Absolution doesn't come cheap, and he doesn't think he could afford to pay the price, doesn't think either one of them could.

He hurries blindly after the healer, finds her after a few wrong turns: on her back just like in the vision, but not in a white room, just on a dirty blanket in the shitty shelter, with the one remaining Sound fighter ninja kneeling beside her, pulling at her clothes. The sight disturbs Naruto more than he cares to admit, even though the rational, natural presumption must be that the guy's checking her for injuries.

"How is she?" he asks, voice low, he can't make it go any higher, and it might be a good thing because she seems unconscious and he's been mean enough without needlessly waking her.

The Sound nin shrugs. "She's been traumatized for a while already, I doubt it that she'll be getting worse."

"She was?"

The man's look tells him: yeah, idiot, since last time you did her.

"Oh." He blinks, takes a few slow, deep breaths. Okay, work from here, make it better. "Is there anything that can be done?" What do I do? I've lost my way (lost it when i was twelve).

"She's the healer. I can't help her, and the Sand ninja will be more concerned conserving resources for people who are useful."

Frank and hard, he could be Sasuke.

"Shit. I'll talk to someone, make them help her, I'll…"

"If you want to, sir, of course."

"But?"

"But, if you'll forgive me saying, it'd be better for everyone involved if she just slept."

"Maybe," he sighs tiredly, sinking back down. "Oh hell. When did everything get so fucked up?"

Distantly he's aware it's not fair to ask the man that. Orochimaru is his master, and the only questions the snake Sannin ever asked were rhetorical. Wrong answers nevertheless made you beg for death for a long time, Naruto knows that, though Sasuke doesn't speak, and not Anko either.

(let the dead lie, they can hurt you so much less that way. yeah, thanks, kakashi, i know that now)

xxxxx

The Battle of Sand Village is just a continuation of the strange nightmare: he runs through what has become a demolished labyrinth, panting from Kyuubi's excitement.

He isn't sure about much else.

Maybe he is trapped there forever, in the nooks and crannies, in splendid isolation. He feels he forgets what humanity feels like, looks like, smells like. There are only rats, and carcasses.

Maybe he fights in a hellish battle, a heathen angel of death.

Yeah, way to whip out the poetry. It's just you have to use the flowery language or it'll choke you, what you're trying to describe. 'Sides, even if he did go all Naturalist and went into great detail about the viciously slaughtered bodies, the stench and the dry merciless sun beating them all into dumb, murdering submission, there's no way he could capture it all. The horror speaks to you from between the impressions, lacing them, framing them, rather than being part of the picture.

He walks through the Great Conquest in a daze, smiling and laughing, cursing and slashing, and every sound he makes reverberates through his head, screeching, jarring. False notes, and he can't grasp the pure ones anymore. Where did they go?

(where did i go?)

(_oh my love, where have you gone_)

Sometime later he comes to, finds himself standing over the healer, shaking with silent laughter and feeling empty enough that maybe Kyuubi's all there is inside him. What then?

_You give me bad thoughts_, he thinks to the girl, on her back still, bandaged under a thin blanket that has to be for show because it's fucking painfully hot; _maybe I should make you go away._

"Naruto," someone says behind him, and there's Gaara.

He can't speak. Words are alien, and I don't even know what I'd want to say, if I could.

Gaara tilts his head to the side, wearing that infuriating soft expression, like he's been through insanity and understands the world's mysteries. "You gave me faith, when I had none. That is what I will try to pass on to my people."

He steps closer, dwarfish and magnificent, red hair partially covering the red kanji (_oh my love, where have you gone_) and presses a fingertip to the symbol, presses the fingertip to Naruto's face. The skin is soft, unmarked, the finger of one who has never touched a weapon; a lie bold as the heat of his body, at the heart of his existence.

"You gave me the possibility to love; and I might claim that I love you." His head swings slowly, slowly, until it is leaning the other way. The dull green eyes are astonishingly unremarkable. "Do not lose your own..." _faith, love, dream_.

Naruto sits down beside the girl and laughs softly, hysterically, muting the sound as best as he can by biting into his arms. It's laugh or cry, and crying burns when Kyuubi has turned his eyes red.

The girl does not wake up, and after realizing that staying means he's going to start shaking her and screaming, he decides it'd probably be a good idea for him to leave.

He wanders the halls for a bit, pleasantly lonely. Never ever could he have imagined he'd one day be relived people shrug away from him in fear/awe/disgust, but the chance he's going to hurt them lessens significantly when they're farther away from him.

Thank god things get a little better, after the worst killing is over. They've won, after all, need only hold the village, put down the occasional attempt at rebellion, send out a few squads on missions. Naruto doesn't go along.

He stays in the palace, the main cupola of which has been made to explode into a trillion tiny pieces, trying to fit his mind back together.

"Naruto-sama, if I may inquire, how long are we staying?" Aiwa asks one day.

Naruto makes an attempt at calculation, says they're staying for Gaara's inauguration as Kazekage, we can be off the day after the ceremony. Sound okay?

Of course it does, Aiwa's what he is and knows not to disagree with his superiors.

Just like the healer girl.

Finally he forces himself to ask Aiwa what her name is.

"Kyouko," Aiwa says, and either he's admitting to a bit of surprise there or Naruto's imagining things. Wouldn't be the first time.

It's ridiculous how certain he is that he'd feel better if he could complain about this to Sasuke, get a cuff on a shoulder and an insult hissed warmly into his ear, something unrepeatable mumbled into the corner of his mouth.

It's so selfish and needy that he wants to hurt himself.

The Inauguration Ceremony and Feast are blurs to him, colors blending together. Hey, shit, I'm getting desperate – maybe that Akatsuki seal Gaara got would be a good idea?

"Sorry," Kankurou says when Naruto stumbles over him and inquires. "I've researched the topic pretty thoroughly, and you've already got it. It was a huge improvement not because it made Gaara perfectly sane but because he was completely mad before. You aren't. I'm sorry I can't help you."

There turns out to be a few other things he wants to discuss, though, and Naruto and Aiwa are brought into a small room to ruminate over the future of the Leaf/Sound/Sand threesome, ah, alliance.

"Seal through marriage?" Naruto repeats dizzily. "Sure, whatever you say, but isn't that kind of – Stone Age?"

"It's working," Kankurou says. "You don't attack your own flesh and blood. Think about it – what's most efficient in keeping Leaf and Sound from each other's throats, the meetings and contracts or the fact you and Sasuke are shacked up?"

The man might have a point, for all Naruto knows (never been in politics, really) or presently cares (and i wanted to be hokage?).

(_oh my love, where_)

Kankurou hands him a bag full of allegedly important documents, give them to Temari and give her my love, alright? We're trusting her to handle the marriage negotiations.

And it's then, very belatedly, that something clicks in Naruto's mind. "Wait," he says. "This wedding. It's supposed to be Gaara's, isn't it?"

"Of course," Kankurou says, rather roughly. "He's prepared to do anything he can to get our village back on its feet."

"But Gaara's…" Naruto gestures helplessly. _Completely fucked-up? Yeah, good going, saying that. Besides, Naruto dear, so are you._ "I thought maybe you…?"

"That won't be possible," Kankurou says shortly, with the resigned air of a man long used to a certain pain. "I was captured, for a time. It's left some marks."

"Right," Naruto says unsteadily. What, they like, castrated you?

Yes, Kankurou's mien says. Yes they did.

Well, fuck.

(i want to go home)

Finally they leave, he and Aiwa and the healer, who's still unsteady, supported by her commander. She refuses to look at Naruto, starts trembling every time he chances a glance her way, even though she must have heard it was Aiwa who thought they should just leave her, Naruto who ordered, in no uncertain and very impolite tones, that she be brought, and made as comfortable as possible.

Which isn't much, of course, but you do what you can.

"Hey," he tries. "I, um. I'm sorry. I don't know what I can do, but I…"

She stares at him with wide, limpid eyes.

"Answer him," Aiwa barks, and she fairly jumps.

"Private conversation," Naruto tells Aiwa, who bows lightly and goes ahead (the girl's slow). He can't help reflecting he's never seen anyone personify defeat quite like this: her shoulder slumped inward, her eyes perpetually straining against their confinements.

He blinks as she falls to her knees – first he thinks she's stumbled, but she bows her head.

Nothing in his life could have prepared him for standing on the outskirts of the desert with a pretty young woman kneeling for him.

"Please," she says, and the word is hushed and slurred; he suddenly realizes it's the first time he's heard her speak. "Please don't tell Orochimaru-sama. _Please_. I'm willing to lay down my life at your convenience, please, _please_."

He can't decide whether it's a good thing that even after he's broken her utterly apart, she's evidently still much more afraid of Sasuke.

He crouches next to her, reaching out with a gentle fingertip she throws herself away from. "Why? I mean, of course I won't tell him if you don't want me to" and god, could I be more hypocritical, but let's be realistic here, "but he's going to find out. Already before we left he thought…"

There he trails off, because her face isn't human anymore, it's a mask like those the ANBU wear, a plastic surface. Abject terror robs her of color and expression, leaves this wooden resignation.

Guilt, present. Frustration, check. Regret, yeah. Confusion, you bet.

She wraps bruised arms around her chest, shaking with her laughter, with her crying.

He couldn't have imagined but probably should have realized that this is the last time he sees her alive; when Aiwa nudges him awake next morning she's a bloodless bundle with a kunai in her throat.

"No," he says, but it's a lament with no fight in it. "Oh shit, no, please."

Tired, worn-down, ground apart (relentless pressure inside his head, outside world shifting in red) he collapses beside her but doesn't think to touch the cold body.

Aiwa puts their things in order, removing all traces of their campsite.

"How can you be so untroubled?" Naruto asks. Doesn't have the strength to get up, just yet.

Aiwa's tone is even, possibly just a smudge resentful. "No offence, sir, but it was best that happened. For everyone."

Thought is a slow process, and outrage too a muted buzz. "What?"

Plainly Aiwa's had enough. His face is hard, old. "Whoever did it cleaned up your mess. The girl was broken, she wasn't going to make it, for her to die before Orochimaru-sama got his hands on her was the merciful option." He shakes sand from the packs. "In Sound no one would have cared you fucked her apart, but in Leaf I am certain it would have made for a scandal."

The dawning of realization is as gradual as it is horrible.

"It was you."

Aiwa doesn't deny it.

"You shit!" Naruto screams. "You fucking monster! How could you?"

Somehow these accusations feel very old.

"That girl," Aiwa says tonelessly, "that sweet girl whom you tortured to death, was my niece. My only family, I cared for her deeply. That was why." He swallows. "You had broken her already. If Orochimaru-sama… As I told you already, fuck if I'd want my boyfriend screwing my subordinates crazy, and it's not like he's going to take it out on you. Have you seen the labs, in Old Sound? You lived for _years_ in those." He stares Naruto in the eye, lifting his gaze from the chin region for the first time. "I killed her body. You'd already killed her soul." He spits. "I don't care about the Kyuubi, but hell if I'm the demon here."

"What the fuck did you say?"

_The truth_, a voice in his head answers.

He thinks, _please don't answer; please don't repeat it._

Aiwa bows formally and says, "Please give my sincerest apologies to Orochimaru-sama", and charges.

Naruto registers the sound of heavy footsteps sliding on sand before even the _sakki_ hits him; turns on reflex, instinct bringing his arm up to block. He feels the impact of the kunai, hisses as the blade cuts through cloth and skin, twisting through muscle, scraping bone. The weapon sticks, and the startled pain with it, as his foot whips up, catching his attacker in the lower torso and kicking him several paces back.

Naruto isn't about to allow him time to recover, is on him, over him, furiously fast. He pounces like the animal he is becoming, landing with his knees on either side of the man's chest, his hands fisted, one around his opponent's wrists, the other in his chest.

Aiwa makes a gurgling sound, and Naruto smiles, licks the tangible smell of blood from his lips.

He comes back to his senses a heartbeat later, sitting on a limp body, Aiwa's lungs in his hand.

Surges away clumsily, bewildered and nauseated. He purges his stomach, hugs himself, inadvertently clawing his own arms. Not that the scratches last.

He'd like to hide under his bed until all the monsters have gone away, but he is the monster now.

(_have you gone?_)

_I need them to seal me_. Yes, yes, he has to get to safety, to where he can be made safe again – on this note, dazed and stumbling through the redness, he turns his nose into the wind and follows the old tracks and missed smells towards home.

xxxxx

The room is familiar, though Naruto isn't sure where exactly he is: followed the sharp scent of chakra, blind for all else in the redness.

But it's real, now. Life is here, and I'm part of it.

(this is where it went, my love)

He looks past the large table at the window, upon the broad ledge of which Sasuke is sitting, one leg stretched indolently in front of him, the other knee drawn up to his chest, arms circling it loosely. He is barefoot, and Naruto notices again with extreme detachment the funny fact that his second and middle toes are longer than his big toes, his face turned towards the glass.

Kyuubi _roars_ through him; Naruto yells back, stares hard and tries to blink back into a view where Sasuke's black hair shades into blue instead of red.

(he's been away for a year, roughly)

Sasuke turns before Naruto touches him, and it's unmistakably Sasuke and it's not Sasuke at all. A mixture of old traits; veins visible through the chalky skin, that familiar annoyance setting his jaw, a bemused blandness to the shape of his mouth. Panda-rings around sharp eyes that seem too large for the skeletal face.

He looks like a ghost, his hand lying like a shadow under Naruto's own on Naruto's face (each side of it has one large mark now, two inches wide and an inch deep).

His tone is light, contemplative. "You fucked the healer. Killed Aiwa? Yeah, I thought you might."

"_Sasuke_."

(he thinks he says it)

One of his hands catches Sasuke's wrist, and yes, he supposes this is a close as he'll get to proof that there are urges in this world that go beyond killing/breeding/power, this solid, bird-frail (_human_) limb inside the circle of his claws.

His other hand jerks at his jacket and the shirt underneath, baring the seal, balefully glowing, perpetually glowing, practically slithering over his skin.

With strange clarity, mentally petrified by the struggle to keep Kyuubi from taking over, from breaking out, breaking free, he notices a large scar playing hide and seek with Sasuke's collar.

Focusing on the internal battle, screaming rage and pain and desperation right back into the Nine Tails' gaping maw, he discovers some amount of time later that he is on his knees. Something warm sticks to his stomach; looking down, he discovers a sloppily sketched pattern, drawn with blood in circles around the original key seal.

Sasuke either has no moved from or has resumed his original position. His hands are shaking visibly and wildly, even fisted; the left palm bleeds sluggishly from where he must have bitten himself.

Feeling Kyuubi like a migraine in the back of his mind, the seal pulsing with slow dread, senses and claws and teeth dimmed, Naruto grabs hold of his muscle control and stands up.

I'm better sealed, yeah, but not as completely as I've been when he's done it before.

Sasuke's trembling does not abide.

Naruto nudges him until he moves, leaving room for both of them on the ledge, and stares the question at his sullen, sickly face with eyes that only retain the merest pinkish hint around the edges.

"My chakra's shot to hell," Sasuke says shortly, like he's poking nasty fun at himself. Bad-tempered, like Naruto's been pestering him about it for a long time, he continues, "I took the Council Akatsuki hunting. Turned out to be a bad idea."

Fuck fear, Naruto thinks, and reaches past the healer and Aiwa and Kyuubi's pounding inside him, lays two fingertips against the scar at Sasuke's collarbone.

"Yes," Sasuke says, concise, precise. "This body is equipped to handle the chakra and Bloodline Limit of one person. It currently contains twice that amount, and its Bloodline Limit has been pressed into its most advanced stage." His mouth twists strangely. "It's overloading."

And both of Naruto's hands are on him, fingers clinging to his shoulders, one palm pressed against the scar, his fronthead resting in the hollow of Sasuke's throat.

His voice is muffled, spoken into the thick fabric of Sasuke's shirt.

"What's going to happen?" _to us._

There is silence, sunlight warm on his back, familiar smells in his nose.

"What usually happens to a container when it is filled with more substance than it can hold?"

xxxxxxxxxx


	49. Sure, I'm Your Fucking Girlfriend

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 49:**

"**Sure, I'm your Fucking Girlfriend"**

"Let go," Sasuke says, with that same familiar voice that has said so many things, through all the years (_moron, dead-last, idiot. naruto_). He sounds ordinary, everyday, and everything is unreal, like one of the desert hallucinations.

Sasuke's fingers close calmly, emotionlessly, around his hands, preparing to lift them away.

Naruto releases the fabric, twists until he's clinging to Sasuke's hands instead. He says, with a sort of wildness, unquenchable like when he was a child and everything would have a happy ending, "That's not okay."

Either the year in Sand didn't happen, or this is an illusion. They can't both be real, he can't simultaneously have Aiwa's blood on his hands and Sasuke's chill solidity under them.

He used to believe anything was possible, in a good sense of the word. You could get yourself a happy ending.

(then there was the valley at the end)

He takes a deep breath, and waits; when things break, Sasuke talks. He did in Country of the Wave, in The Valley at the End.

(there are things worth fighting for)

"It's nothing acute," he says now, looking away. "We can both – there is nothing to force me to use much chakra."

Naruto's grip firms, he's clutching Sasuke's fingers, defiant, desperate. "We're not going to explode! We're not some kind of fucking containers!"

"We are both vessels for divine legacies," Sasuke says, with that strange, hard look. "We both have powers that go beyond humanity, where human bodies can't follow."

"We're going to come out if it alright!" _We are!_ and he could weep.

And Sasuke laughs, that sobbing sociopath laughter Naruto has only heard once, when they were twelve and Sasuke was still Sasuke, only Sasuke. "We haven't been alright for a long time."

He tilts his head to the side, eyes close, gaze distant.

He says, and his voice is alien and even, a chilling, certain thing: "You know, I burned down the Compound. I don't like unfinished business.

"We've been living with Kakashi, since. It was for the best.

"I think Itachi would have agreed to stay with Sakura for a while, but she wants me to keep away from Rina, and I agreed: she is afraid I am turning into Orochimaru." He smiles like this is a great joke, every line of him tense and unhappy, hysterical.

"It's the other way around."

Naruto fills in the implied gaps, hurried, hesitant, but it couldn't be any other way.

_You reconnected with the child inside you, and I guess that allowed you to grow up, huh?_

Of course this might lead Sakura-chan to think what she does.

Naruto, who is a child himself, trapped and tried and _tired_; Naruto knows.

That inner child is still lying where it fell, wanting to curl up only it hurts too much, crying its broken heart out in thick snotty chunks; Sasuke prefers to get up.

They both do. Only the two of us, always and forever and in the end.

And they are sitting here together, and it is all real, they are doomed and dead and Naruto _doesn't care anymore_.

Sasuke is looking at him, chest hitching under his touch.

There is rage and guilt, shame and horror, jealousy and betrayal, love and hatred, need and despair, lust and the ache for violence, that same spiral that has hounded them from almost the start, and for a moment he is just so tired of it all. You'd never think it gets old or tedious or wearisome, having your relationship build on sex and fighting, but it does, it does.

"You're you," Naruto says quietly. Certain as stone, certain as he's always been of this one thing.

"Maybe that's the problem," Sasuke says softly, matter-of-factly, with that old self-deprecating bitterness.

Is it possible to change something you crave so desperately, to step back and assess something that owns you up?

Naruto decides he does not care about the desert, sees Aiwa and Kyouko and Gaara, the red sand infesting reality.

It'll never go away. Some stains are like that.

"Does it matter to you?" he asks. "I got your squad killed."

Sasuke shrugs. "I wasn't expecting anything else."

"She was scared of you. The healer."

"For good reason," Sasuke replies. "Everyone in Sound is."

And they're sitting here still, in the bleak sunlight, and his head is pounding with the force of Kyuubi's anger, his hands are warm around Sasuke's, our pulses aligning.

"We need to get you sealed up properly," Sasuke says at last. "It'll be good practice for Itachi."

"I'm not sure that's a good idea."

Sasuke shrugs. "Kakashi can supervise. If it goes to hell I'll take over, or we'll have to call in either Jiraiya or a sealing expert from Sound."

"The faster the better," Naruto relents. "Where is he?"

Sasuke offers a bleak smirk. "Out training the Hyuuga kids." Naruto's surprise must have shown on his face; Sasuke looks amused, explains, rather off-handedly, "Leaf is still short on people, and Itachi wants Neji to teach him some things. That means Neji doesn't have much time to train his own kids."

Neji and Hinata have three children now, two sons and a daughter. Normal children, serious and severe the way all Hyuuga are, but with soft tints, smiles. Naruto does not think they are unhappy, or that Hinata is.

Sasuke makes to stand, still trembling and sneering down at his own unsteady limbs, and Naruto moves with him. Sasuke, rather incredibly, lets himself be steadied, says Itachi will be home by the time they've arranged the necessary preparations, scrolls and ink and whatnot. We might as well do it at home.

That'd mean Kakashi's place, yeah.

"Okay," Naruto says, has to speak softly now he is so close. "I need – I want to see Rina-chan, and Sakura-chan."

"Go ahead."

Yeah, he thinks. Yeah, I will.

Except his arms tighten around Sasuke, drag him around and in close, he rests his face against the juncture of neck and shoulder and just holds on. Sasuke's frailer than he was, skin cold and clammy, the bumps of his spine prominent hollows; after some brief hesitation his hands lock around Naruto's neck, fingers digging into his flesh.

He stands there shaking and can't loosen the grip. I did miss you.

Everything is always so difficult, with them, but now Naruto's mumbling something along his jaw, and maybe it can be simple, simple as this.

They shift closer, ribs scratching against ribs, jutting hipbones hitting against their counterparts, knees colliding awkwardly.

Naruto laughs softly in his ear, and this is a bad idea. He feels Naruto's heartbeat, the hard double thuds of it (naruto's, kyuubi's, again and again) and wants to hold it in his hand, swallow it down into him.

Naruto draws back a very little, stares into certain eyes, and they're dark – they aren't green, but someone else's was, and they aren't red, but with Sasuke's chakra in its current state that's likely a necessity.

_Keep me hanging on._

Eventually they part, and Sasuke's hands are still unsteady and Naruto's seal is still a mild burn, and do we care it's a bad idea?

Yeah, guess we do.

Naruto flashes a grin (false like the way his fingers linger around sasuke's isn't) and jumps out the window; Sasuke turns the other way without looking after him.

As he walks through the village, so familiar and so mirage-strange, he fancies this is what it must have been like for Sasuke, with the first Itachi newly dead; everything that should be home but isn't, the faces that shouldn't be like you saw them only yesterday but are.

Sakura-chan's building is where his legs knew it would be; with the new paranoia he glimpses an ANBU watching him (won't kill him, same side here, and anyway it was technically a sound mission, tsunade will have to wait, calm down, calm _down_) as he forces the door clumsily open, jogs up the stairs, knocks.

It's Ino who opens. Whoa, he thinks, staring into the pretty face, blond hair and unmarked skin. Beautiful and young and careless.

"Hi," he says, rather stupidly, not minding if he's sheepish or stares like a fool, like a foreigner.

"Hi," she echoes, non-plussed, then abruptly remembers her manners and steps back to let him in. His feet in the broken sandals are very dirty on the pale floor. Makes it all more real. "Rina-chan will be ecstatic."

"Yeah?"

Ino smiles at him, that rich artsy smile, and leans into the apartment proper to call for the child.

Rina-chan runs in, with the clumsy silly gait of a typical five-year-old child, stops in the doorway to take him in with wide eyes and open mouth.

"Daddy?" She says the word slowly, as though trying it out anew, and how long is a year from a child's perspective anyway? He should have been better than to just abandon her and run off to Sand; whatever else you might say about Sasuke as a parent, he'd have never done that to Itachi.

Of course, Naruto would never treat his child as an efficient tool that needs to be honed rather than as a person needing to be loved, so maybe that equals out.

He crouches, a little uncertain, still so thrown. "Hiya, girlie."

"_Daddy_," she repeats, in wary, astonished delight, and chances a step closer. That's as far as she goes, before Naruto leans forward and scoops her up, cradling her squirming, giggling body against his chest, burying his grimy, whisker-streaked face in curly brown hair.

_God, but I love you, baby. God help us both, but how I love you._

He realizes he did not think of her once in the desert, not specifically about her.

He also almost chokes on the soft, soft swell inside him, these unfocused tender feelings that reach out to own him up.

His voice is thick, rough, mumbling sweet nothings into her hair. _Oh, my baby._

"I'm sorry," Ino says with what sounds like genuine regret from far away, only his hearing is keen too now, fox demon and paranoia sharpening it infinitely, "but I have to go, I have a mission. Can you take her?"

There are reasons he shouldn't, shouldn't be allowed, doesn't deserve. "I have to talk to Sakura-chan."

"She's in the shower," Ino says. "She's been working herself stupid lately." She holds out her arms for Rina-chan. "Too bad, kiddo, but you'll have to stay with your grandparents for a bit instead."

Rina-chan makes a face, nose scrunching up adorably, her mother's eyes round and innocent in the chubby face (he remembers itachi was always lean, even as a baby; probably didn't get enough nutrition during his time in the womb) and complains that she doesn't want to go to her grandparents, I want to stay with Daddy.

"Tomorrow, baby girl," Naruto promises her. "I need to speak to Mommy, but I'll come play with you tomorrow."

"Naruto?"

He looks up past Rina-chan's pout to see Sakura-chan, tall and tanned, drying her hair in the doorway.

Speech is hard, his throat constricting, spasming. "Sakura-chan."

"Then can I go stay with Father?" Rina-chan suddenly inquires.

"Sure," says Naruto, at the same time Sakura-chan admonishes, "You know I don't want that."

They look at each other; he shrugs awkwardly. "Your decision," he admits. "But he's not Orochimaru. He's as much Sasuke as he's ever been."

"You trust him?" Her eyes are level, adult, that particular pale catty green.

"With Rina-chan? Yeah, absolutely."

"Okay, then. Will you drop her off at Sasuke's instead, please, Ino?"

Ino nods, takes the startled girl, and bids them both a smiling goodbye ("good to have you back"; "see you later, baby").

Sakura-chan's keen as always, clearly knows what he's here for: confession, penance, absolution.

With Ino and Rina-chan gone, Sakura-chan takes him by the hand and leads him into the living room. He follows in a daze, transfixed by the warm, calloused skin, the reeling otherness of being treated as part of a family.

"You were in Sand for a long time," she says, the prompting phrase. She sits on a couch, pink rattails around her face, a damp white dressing gown wrapped around her body. She's kind and impersonal, an idea given form, and yes, he knows it's unfair to perceive her like that but no, he can't help it.

I'm really very tired of trying to justify myself with that line.

It spills out in an unstructured rush; he's kneeling on the rug, his face buried in her lap, his arms clutching around her waist, her hands in his hair, bestowing and withholding blessing.

"It was bad," he says. "Almost the worst."

So many words, so few excuses. _And even Gaara pretty much told me I was going mad, and he was right, I was, and the healer, and what I did with her, all the things I did to her, and Aiwa, and what he shouldn't have been able to make me do, and why…_

She stares into nothing, her hand heavy on Naruto's head; feels a judge, an oracle, and desperately unqualified.

You fucked a girl to death because she had my eyes and Sasuke's face, and that's pretty much how you usually interact with him.

But she comprehends that war is ugly, and having come to terms with what Naruto and Sasuke did for her in Neo Rock Village it'd be hypocritical and meaningless to raise that issue now. And Aiwa could not have lived, would not have wanted to, and she understands instinct, she thinks, the way Kyuubi might condition Naruto's reflexes.

Be practical, she thinks. I love you, and I hate seeing people I love hurt.

She asks very calmly, "Does Sasuke know about this?"

"Yes," he says, a shaky exhalation. "He doesn't care."

Suppose he wouldn't, not if the girl's dead.

"It's alright," Sakura says, stroking his hair. "You can have It sealed, right?"

She feels his nod against her thighs. "Yeah. Sasuke did a preliminary seal, before. We're fixing it completely tonight. It's not - it's not gonna be like it was. But it'll - it has to work."

"You – do know he's been living with Kakashi?"

Tense though he is, he remains in the kneeling, clinging position and nods again.

"On my insistence," she adds, feels his startle. "Itachi-kun deserves at least one stabile parental figure, and someone had to keep an eye on Sasuke. He agreed when I suggested it but I don't – I don't think he'd have come up with the idea on his own."

Naruto snorts, a weak sound, sits back with wet eyes. "You don't have to sugarcoat. Of course he's sleeping with him. I understand. I'm hardly in a position to throw stones, either."

"No," she says, rather dryly, gladder than she can justify. "I guess none of us are. Come here."

You're mine, she thinks, hugging him with her entire body, arms around his back, her chest and face pressed to his. I understand that concept now, of someone being your family through thick and thin, your precious person. It matters what you've done, of course it does, but it – it can't change anything.

"You're such a stupid little boy," she mutters. "But I love you, I love you so very much, so please be alright."

This, she can handle. In so many ways Naruto is easier than Sasuke, because his mind works with simple truths. Sasuke might not lie to her, but he lies to himself all the time, and that makes everything difficult.

(i have the absolutely unwanted, absurdly vivid recollection of sleeping with him, feel the movement of his body inside mine; the tangible idea i am healing him.

isn't that every woman's dream? oh dear, do i sound bitter?)

But you're my kit, aren't you?

Yes, yes you are. Yes, yes I am.

xxxxx

Ino is rather doubtful about this, making her perilous way up the unkempt staircase with Rina-chan in tow. The girl has become something like a combination of daughter/favorite niece/little sister, and Sasuke is …what he is.

Inhuman, in so many ways, but she also recalls the night the Council returned from their rather successful Akatsuki hunt, when Sasuke's chakra lines where burning bright blue against pasty skin and Kakashi-sensei's supporting him was so desperately needed they could not even make it discreet.

He has never, as far as she can tell, been very interested in Rina-chan. Not hostile, not doting.

She has the grace to admit that in this case 'as far as she can tell' only barely skims the surface.

Team Seven is what it is, now and forever; she resolutely repressed all sensitivity to chakra when Naruto came by, as she's learned to always do in his presence. He's nice enough, kind and easily manipulated, Sasuke's antithesis.

The relevant question, too often, is which one of them is going to protect you from the other. Right now she is betting her money on Sasuke, with Naruto frayed around the edges and reddish eyes, from tears or demon she did not want to find out.

At least the apartment's more inviting now, after Sasuke appropriated the adjourning one and had them both fixed up to normal standard. Itachi needed a room, of course; Ino wisely does not ask where Sasuke sleeps.

He opens the door quickly enough, giving her one of those completely blank looks she's gotten used to, the ones saying I don't consider you worth shit but Sakura will have my head if I let that slip.

She smiles back, as nastily as she's able. Shit, I can't believe I was in love with this asshole all these years… At least he looks good.

If you like your men small and gaunt.

"Evening," she says. "Delivery." She fits a comforting hand around Rina-chan's shoulder, pushes the girl forward from where she's clinging shyly to Ino's leg. "Sakura'll pick her up after the night shift."

"I see."

Asshole, she thinks again, almost fondly, and turns her back on the closing door.

Inside, seated on a kitchen chair and staring curiously at the multitude of items assembled on the table, which she has been told in no uncertain terms that she is not to touch, Rina bites lightly at her lip. Chances a glance through her lashes at Father.

Finds that he's looking straight back at her, like always, even though she tries so hard to be cautious, sneaky, like a real ninja.

"Why are you here?" he asks evenly. He doesn't sound angry, or particularly curious. Looks tense and displeased, but he almost always does.

(_and years later i will think, perhaps that was why i kept trying to get closer to him. to everyone else i was always his daughter, regarded as his and as a child, in varying degree. he alone didn't see me as that; he had no idea what it meant to be kid, so i couldn't be that to him, and he didn't think of me as his. i was just this person he kind of knew. for the first time, and the last?)_

"Mom's working late," she answers. That won't be good enough, not for him. "Daddy said I could come here."

He gives her a strange look; he doesn't _feel_ like her father. It's always been weird to have him put her to bed, help her in the bathroom, try and care for her when she's been ill – almost like an uninvolved adult, a friends' parent or something, is intruding upon the private family bubble.

"Are you afraid of me?" he asks, thoughtful.

"I," she starts, stops. Almost everyone is scared of him, she knows that. "I don't think so. Sometimes, maybe? When – I was when Mom was."

"She wasn't afraid of me," Sasuke says dismissively. "She was afraid for you."

The evening when he burned down the Compound, and his face was pinched and bleakly insane, and Rina couldn't take her eyes away from the sight. He looked like an illustration in one of her picture books, a child demon against a backdrop of roaring flames ('_katon goukakyuu no jutsu_').

(lost between the layers of the world, burning his way out)

She should be able to master the fire jutsu, she knows that; nagged him into trying to teach her once, when Itachi-niisan had returned home from a mission with burn-blisters on his lips and explained it was from the Katon.

"Me too?" she asked. "You taught Itachi-niisan when he was my age, didn't you?" She was four, barely.

"I suppose I did," he said, to her considerable surprise. She rarely dares ask him for anything (he doesn't invite it) but he's never… she can't remember he's ever actually denied her. "Suppose it's only fair, then. Come along."

At the edge of a lake he stopped, and after she'd finished being distracted by the glimmers on the surface, the waves and the reeds, she watched him blow a fire ball large as a house over the rippling waters.

She stared, mouth shaping a soundless circle. It was done slowly, showily, pedagogically – not the lightning-fast moves of a real battle, not the gritty realism.

There was an explanation too, which was both flattering and infuriating, shameful – he spoke like the teachers of the advanced classes, fast and precise, using terms of phrase she did not understand even though he expected her to.

Later he told her it was okay she couldn't do it, wiped a frustrated tear from her cheek with his thumb. It doesn't matter, it's alright, and she got a piggy-back ride home.

At first she thought the condolences were empty, knowing Itachi-niisan had done it perfectly at once, but maybe they were not, because Father was saying, I couldn't do it at four either, I didn't learn until I was seven, we'll try again later.

It was doubtlessly meant as a promise. It sounded a little like a threat.

The worst part was she almost believed him when he said it didn't matter – _doesn't that mean I don't matter?_

Mom said Father's just not very good at handling children and she shouldn't mind, it's crazy, expecting such things from little kids.

She says now, in Kakashi-sensei's kitchen, not exactly meaning to, "You're Itachi-niisan's father."

He gives her a faintly startled, faintly amused look. "Actually," he says, rearranging some of the objects she's been told not to touch, "if you want to get technical, I am his mother."

"What?" Is he joking? Nah, this is Father. "But how?"

He smiles thinly, the expression that Mom calls – what is it? _Smirking._

"I used a female body for a while. It's a simple jutsu. I could show you sometime, if you want."

Now?

He shakes his head, grimacing. "I'm afraid not. I need to conserve my chakra in case something goes wrong with…" He stops himself. "Has Sakura told you about this? Sealing the Kyuubi?"

Rina repeats it with a certain amount of pride, a classified piece of homework well learned, "She said you and Daddy each have a demon inside you that gives you trouble from time to time, but that you help each other out with them."

He's still smiling; he doesn't look happy at all. "Well," he says. "That's not exactly true. My demon and I have been the same entity for a long time now."

Daddy has a demon, I am one. Oh, my stupid little girl, your innocence will kill you, and I won't even be able to mourn it because you cannot belong in this dirty world.

Itachi-niisan and Kakashi-sensei enter together before her open mouth has formed words. Itachi-niisan steps out of his shoes and directly towards her, sharing a smile; Kakashi-sensei nods in her direction.

"Naruto?" he inquires.

Sasuke shrugs confirmation around the heavy pulse of chakra trembling against his skin. "He'll be here any minute. Itachi will be sealing him."

The boy turns fast, attentive red eyes cautious. He wets his lips. "I see."

Twisting away from Kakashi's concerned gaze on the blue glow where his skin is thin, Sasuke asks, "How's Anko?"

"Bitchy as hell; she's fine. Hanabi's definitely something else." He touches a ginger hand to his chest. "On a purely professional level, the new legs are an improvement."

They would be. She's marginally clumsier, yes, without the fine motor control of her feet, but her prosthesis can't be broken, can kick through solid rock if need be.

This is when Naruto's chakra enters the building, shortly followed by a knock; he doesn't wait for anyone to open, though, pokes a scruffy blond head into the hallway. "Hi."

It strikes him that this was the worst possible time to send Rina-chan to Sasuke, when heavy jutsu will take place in the apartment and there's no one free to look after her.

(don't look at sasuke)

His gaze glides eventually from Rina-chan, pauses warm on Kakashi as he nods tight greeting, fixes on Itachi, meets the familiar red-black eyes.

I'm glad you're back, we're doing this, you and me now, and who'd have ever thought, but I trust you.

Rina-chan peeps wide-eyed through her fingers as Itachi-niisan and Kakashi-sensei paint elaborate designs on the floor, and over Daddy's gaunt flesh.

He still looks sixteen, Itachi can't help reflecting. No, he doesn't just look it, physically he _is_ sixteen, always will be.

If he lives that long, and he might, he really might, Nine Tails is immortal...

At one point a red mass of chakra explodes out of him, but overall Naruto stays pliant, drained, as Itachi completes the many complex seals. Kakashi-sensei adds a few extra ones, just to be on the sure side, but he's done it.

If he were the sort of boy who smiles at accomplishments, now would be the time.

He isn't.

xxxxxxxxxx


	50. Beyond the Beyond

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 50:**

"**Beyond the Beyond"**

Afterwards Itachi takes Rina-chan, who has doubtlessly been sneaking many terrified peeks and eavesdropped shamelessly from the adjourning room ("be ready to hit me with a tsukiyomi, yeah?"). His room, since they moved.

He thinks about that, sometimes. About how he didn't particularly want to switch residence, but you do what you must, and maybe this turned out for the best.

About how Sasuke is softer with Kakashi-sensei, about how he doesn't care so much.

Wonders what it'll be like, now Naruto is home. It was a surprise, that he could actually feel relived at that, but …I might not like him, but he's family, and Sasuke's been strange and wrong.

Of course, Itachi might have been quite upset himself, if his chakra usage had been suddenly and drastically restrained.

Of course, he knows that that's not the issue, not the real one.

Rina-chan doesn't protest when he picks her up; it's easiest to move the clumsy child through touch, physically make sure he won't lose her.

He says, measuring distance and tension between the three adults, the closest to parents that he has, which isn't very, "I'm taking her to her grandparents."

Kakashi-sensei comes with them out into the chilly evening.

Itachi decides not to ask.

They leave Rina-chan with Sakura-san's parents, then – clearly hesitate, looking at each other in what soon becomes amusement.

Neither one is willing to return home.

Where, presently, Naruto is still sitting in the inked circle, panting slowly through the exhaustion/confusion/pain/strangeness/weakness/_relief_. A dozen thick, tough seals separate the red power from his mind; there lingers only the barest, merest tad of light pink, if he moves his right eye too fast.

He looks up from a sluggish inspection of his hands, which are softer now, with stubby fingers and almost no nails, traces of the inked characters still faintly visible through his skin, looks up at Sasuke crouching close to him.

"Heh," he says, mouth moving slowly, equally sluggishly – he's been through the grinding vulnerability of being sealed before, but never this acutely. "You still mad?"

"I don't let go of my grudges," Sasuke says.

They solidify your being you, yeah, I've guessed.

"Yeah," Naruto grins, must grin. It hurts too much not to. "You don't let go of much of anything."

(don't let go of me, _don't ever let me go_)

Sasuke makes an impatient gesture, continues as though he hasn't heard, and he is just a brat after all, at the mercy of the world, speaking fast and sharp, as though fearing reality will gag him before the words are out, "I hate _this_."

This whole stupid situation, you and me in this filthy world that takes everything away except the things you wish you could get rid of.

He makes a visible but not entirely successful attempt to compose himself, goes on, bitter and determined, "But I'm an adult now. I have to deal."

(we have to)

"Yeah," Naruto says again. Sasuke can't smack him around until he gets Kyuubi back under control anymore: the battle will be done in a minute, less, with a single strike. Naruto locked in the bloodstained darkness of the Tsukiyomi or Sasuke left at the mercilessness of Naruto's rage and his own fucked-up chakra.

"Can't you switch bodies?" he finds himself asking. The thought disgusts him, but compared to the idea of _this_… it has some merit.

Viciously blank, with the bland cold tones of utter enraged humiliation, Sasuke says, "I'm too unstable. My chakra structures would collapse into my consciousness."

"Well, fuck."

"Yeah."

And ten years ago this would have been an obvious catastrophe, the end of everything, but Sasuke's brother Itachi has died, and Orochimaru, and scores of Akatsuki. That isn't a challenge anymore. The outer demons are defeated and gone.

Remains so the inner ones, and it's a different kind of strength you need to fight them anyway.

Just, can you call it battle when you're dead certain about the outcome? Sasuke's stubborn as hell, he'll bitch and nag and murder-stare any internal monsters to shit. It gives me a warm glow; even though Naruto is aware it won't come cheap, that inevitable victory.

"You're back," Sasuke says, which is painfully redundant and so must mean something else, and does.

"I am," Naruto says. "For good."

(_as are you, asshole_)

He tries a smile without canines. "Itachi's grown up."

"Yes," Sasuke agrees. "Yes he has." Itachi is ten years old, going on eleven.

He remembers when they were that age, and younger.

A glimpse of a dollish boy following an adored brother; a quick look-away from the grubby blond orphan you aren't supposed to let yourself see.

The awareness he's there, even before that night Sasuke brought him not-home, and screamed at himself.

Looking at each other in blinding white sunlight, Naruto atop at hill, Sasuke with Itachi's blood on his hands and, as Naruto came to understand so much later, Itachi's seed joining with things inside him.

Knots on that red thread of fate that Sasuke at least refuses to believe in, and I still love you, even now, even then, even always.

He reaches for Sasuke, who scoffs and locks his hands over the whisker scars, curious, callously cruel nails catching in the marks. Sasuke can't move out of this body he wears, but hey, can you visit mine? I'd like to take your soul inside me, have it, keep it, own it, feel it under my skin.

Wetness touches his lip; he licks at it reflexively, realizing, holy shit, _I can bleed. _Is bleeding, from a scratch on his cheek, where Sasuke's cut him.

"You know," he mutters, which is code for, _This is all very complicated but the simple fact's that I love you_. Sasuke's hands are steady, now, and the blueness has receded from skin that flushes pink instead where blood beats close under the surface.

Locking a weak hand around Sasuke's neck, he falls back against the coach, leaning his head on the sitting cushions and catching Sasuke's mouth in a slow hot kiss that ought to have been bad (the angle's wrong, he's disoriented from the sealing and still ashamed and emotionally maimed from the desert, and sasuke's angry and cranky and scared because he can't cling to those feelings as avidly as he wants, they're melting, lurking under the surface, and the surface glitters, distracting) but they've done this so often that circumstances hardly matter.

To Kyuubi this is so very much about dominance, the pleasure of taking – were he not sealed, he'd have had Sasuke pinned to the floor, possibly bruised and probably with Naruto inside him. Because it's easiest to just go along with the red screaming in his mind, and Sasuke's learned not to mind being on the bottom, hell, not like Orochimaru let him do anything else, and then he was a girl for almost a year, and Naruto's always preferred, if he can choose, to do the doing.

It's nice to be able to curl up, press his cheek to Sasuke's collarbone, and think, with a boyish grin, _Sure, baby, I'll be your girl._

xxxxx

"It's rather obvious," Tsunade says.

Temari nods tersely, strained and severe as she's been since Naruto first approached her with news and Kankurou's documents. She says, "Yes. Hyuuga Hanabi would be the ideal candidate."

Naruto is the only one present to startle, and it is a belated movement. His mind is pleasantly languid, far from focused on the discussion. Beside him Sasuke has fixed that blank, haughty mask on his face and is thinking little of political repercussions.

Anko looks uncomfortable but doesn't protest; and someone has to, right?

"But," Naruto says loudly. "But she's – traumatized or something, and Gaara's…"

"We really do not have many other possibilities," Tsunade says. "It has to be someone of sufficient rank and connections that they can represent Leaf as a whole, preferably Sound too, and furthermore they need be skilled enough to survive the Ichibi."

Temari gives him a steady, unreadable look. "Gaara would have you, if that were the issue, but Sand would not accept another Jinchuuriki, and…"

…and it goes on and on. Everyone would be ecstatic about Sasuke – except, of course, Sasuke. He has the connections and the power, but Sound would collapse, and Naruto.

Itachi is young, yes, but he's always been before his time. Perfect representant for Sound and Leaf both. Needless to say Sasuke would engage in another bloody war before he agreed to these terms for a peace which he is not actually much concerned with.

Sakura-chan has the right connections, family of Sasuke and Naruto both, but she'd die, and Team Seven in its entirety adamantly refuses.

Hinata and Neji are already married – were they not, Neji would be only a Branch Hyuuga, and Hinata wouldn't survive a day in Sand. Their oldest son has yet to turn ten.

Most of the rest of those who could be counted on to survive – Kakashi, Ibiki, Anko, Gai – do not have the right pedigree. Maybe Kakashi, except his father slew too many important Sand ninja in the war.

Which means it boils down to Jiraiya or Hanabi – the Legendary Sannin, the Hyuuga Princess.

"She's roughly the same age, and if it's a girl they won't have to bother with jutsu in order to procure heirs," Tsunade summarizes in the clear-cut tones of one who wishes she were drunk and very shortly will be.

"I'll talk to her," Anko says.

"Today," Tsunade stipulates. "We want these contracts signed as fast as possible."

No time like the present, huh?

Anko nods, jumps out the window in a flashy unnecessary exit to burn some energy, and goes to find her girl.

Not that that's exactly the right word anymore – Hanabi's twenty, has been a legal adult since she was half that age.

She's sitting on a hillside, in what used to be a forest – Sasuke and Naruto leveled it during a fight years ago, and it has yet to fully recover. Her hair is a brilliant, glaring white, announcing her presence in spite of the perfected stillness – and yes, she does look like a girl. Curled up, chin resting on her knees, underdeveloped and paper-thin. Everybody's underweight, since the war started taking its toll on their food supplies years ago.

"Anko," she says, mild and sweet, with the ruined voice of one whose vocal chords have been on far too intimate terms with a kunai. Turns around, and finally she has learned to keep the Byakugan deactivated, sometimes, and her snow-pale face is childish too, with the large eyes and the fine bone structure; there's a scar crawling over her chin, but Anko supposes you might call her pretty, if you aren't picky about it.

"Hiya, kiddo." Sitting down next to the girl, Anko stretches out her legs, leans back on her hands. After a while she discloses, "You know the Hokage wanted to talk to me. Naruto's back from Sand. Apparently Gaara's Kazekage now."

"Oh?" Funny how the world works out. She crushed on Sasuke for years; Naruto saved her life. Through the distance of white hair and the reason for it, the distance of legs made of metal, she is rather fond of them.

"We're opting to seal the good relations with a state marriage."

"I see." Inscrutable, unconcerned. "You know I haven't slept with a man since the, the Akatsuki incident. I don't know if I could."

"That might be a problem," Anko admits grimly. Sick world, sending a fucked-up girl off to wed a demonic lunatic.

Sick world, a Genin girl given over to the Snake Master.

You do what you must, or it's done to you.

They give it a test run, not taking chances; Naruto blows a gasket and her father goes mental but no one cares about that, least of all Hanabi. So they put her in Jiraiya's bed, so what? I'm used goods already.

She knows what she wants, but she isn't going to marry what she wants, so that would have been a pointless exercise.

It's _heavy_: sounds that weigh a ton, pushed from his lungs by movements slow and weighty, through his gigantic, aging bulk. She looks at the dirty ceiling, head thrown back. His hands, guiding, on her shoulders, his sex in her body. She feels practically nothing, which is very good – no pain, no fear, no humiliation. Just a job. It doesn't even hurt very much. I know I could kill him, after all.

The preparations are smooth on both sides, agreements reached, escorts assembled: a month after Gaara's inauguration, his bride commences her travel towards him.

Naruto and Sasuke both attend the farewell ceremony, at the former's insistence. Rather, Naruto is present on his own insistence, Sasuke would have had to put in an appearance in any case and stands around constituting a dark spot in the high-born clique: the Hokage to his right, the Hyuuga contingent to his left.

Unexpectedly, Naruto finds himself face to face with Hanabi. "Oh," he says, tries a grin that must be sheepish, desperate. "Um, hi."

She gives him a tranquil smile, blank eyes staring through him. "Naruto-sama." It's the first time she's ever called him that, will be the last. She offers a short, elegant bow. "It occurs to me I have never thanked you for saving my life. I would like to do so now."

His instinct is to touch her, pull her up from the bow, but he has learned not to touch frail-looking girls. His impulse is to blabber assurances that a hero naturally saves people, don't mention it (except to everyone you meet) but the words are wooden in his mouth and she's looking over his shoulder, at where Sasuke and her family are standing. And I'm not a hero and there's nothing natural about what I saved you from.

He says nothing. They look at each other, briefly, wryly; when he blinks she is gone.

Afterwards he wades through the Hyuuga children, wide-eyed and ominously silent, walks past Hinata's desolate face and Neji's coldly furious features, latches on to Sasuke: I want to go home.

He knows they have to stay, but he really wants to go home.

This is wrong, by gut feeling, at bone-deep level. To sell your future, you body and your heart – not in a mission that will be over, but for always, for something larger than your life, larger than love.

"Congratulations," Sasuke tells the Hyuuga in a voice that says, _My condolences_. He nods to Tsunade, moves, but not away from Naruto's fingers on his elbow. "Let's go home."

Startled, Naruto opens his mouth to protest, aren't we needed?

Nah, clearly they're not. People are filing out, and he spots Kakashi's hair in a corner, with – yeah, that's Iruka-sensei's ponytail, and that's Anko's.

Let's go home.

Their living arrangements have been damn awkward lately, a tentative patchwork. Naruto slept over at Sakura-chan's two nights, watching Rina-chan's delighted face as she fell asleep. The darling girl offered to share her bed, but sleeping alongside Sasuke gives you reflexes, after a time, and Naruto does not want to reward an innocent poke with a decisive blow. Floor's fine by me, princess.

The rest of the time they've sort of taken turns; Sasuke has keys to all the official buildings in Sound, and they don't make for bad sleeping quarters.

Eventually they'll have to try for final solutions, of course this interlude can't last, but Itachi probably doesn't want to move, and no one is eager to deal with the complications involved.

Then they're back, in the apartment Naruto barely recognizes from when he first visited it, just after he'd won the Chuunin Exam, when Sasuke was just shy of a week pregnant. They would have needed the space, of course: the kitchen and single bedroom, with the miniscule hallway and smaller bathroom, would not have been enough for a family of three. The kitchen is quite large now, the bathroom too has expanded, and there's a kind of living room, filled with porn and official documents, in between the two sleeping areas.

Naruto becomes occupied with the marks on Sasuke's hands, the captivating pattern of baby scars from early childhood training. Mesmerized, trying to keep track, find his way through the haphazard labyrinth, he decides he wants a mark for himself. It doesn't seem fair there're just the seal and the whisker scars; those are Kyuubi's.

This won't last either, but he bites his lip on a defiant grin and around the sharp ticklish pain as Sasuke traces a figure under his chin. Damn stupid place, probably, but it was an impulse, and injuring his hands would be moronic, and on his face it will show too blatantly, and mostly every other part of him is covered.

They stumble into banter, ugly brutal needing – have to laugh at it because it hurts so much you'll wind up crying, otherwise. When you can't stop poking at the wounds, the least you can do is make sure those pokes are covered in the burning, easing antiseptic of gallows humor.

_Manly_, Sasuke says, half on the subject of the new scar; disgusted, fond.

Yeah, Naruto thinks. One ought to be disgusted, when manly is code for mean fucker, literally mean fucker, nasty wife-beating can't take a no fucker.

When it could apply to both of them.

"Yeah right," he says, with a grin that's only mostly forced, feeling the scars ache, the whiskers and the new one below his chin, etched into the soft skin there. "Actually I'm tired of this hard bony manliness. Reminds me there's this great trick I haven't tried on you…" A few seals, quick and known for so many years, heavy with nostalgia, a smooth phrase.

"That's vile," Sasuke pronounces, looking damn honest and a little green. "It doesn't even look like you, and for god's sake put some clothes on, there's someone at the door."

"_Naruto_," Sakura says the moment she is inside, scandalized and at the point of giggling, and Sasuke turns with dread. Naruto's grinning, flushed, dressed again and applying a more modest version of the Oiroke no Jutsu, not the porn goddess that enthralls Jiraiya but a female version of his scrawny, adolescent self.

Rina stares with big eyes and lets go of Itachi to hurry forward, effectively stopping her trod by colliding with Naruto's legs. Her brother raises an eyebrow in subconscious mimicry of his father; Kakashi offers an exasperated sort of grin.

"Stop that," Sasuke irritably orders Naruto, who's scooping up Rina and strangling a laugh and making googly eyes at Sasuke. "You're reminding me of Ino." The Ino of so many years ago.

"Sheesh, fine," Naruto mutters, still amused by his own antics, and changes back in a puff of smoke, leaving Rina indignant with excited non-comprehension, pawning at his face and chest.

This is the rather unfortunate point at which the child remembers Sasuke's distracted promise to show her the girl jutsu he used.

"I, well…" _am really not sure this is a good idea._ "Alright, whatever."

He empathically doesn't want to, associates the female body so strongly with the helplessness of advanced pregnancy, and it's stupid, neither Kakashi nor Sakura needs to see this reminder of painful pasts.

_But I will not be afraid_, and anyway, he's not going to lie to their daughter.

Sakura draws a deep breath when his transformation is complete, feeling the suddenly compact tension in the room. Unsurprisingly it's an exact replica of the body Sasuke wore to seduce his brother, and it's a shock he's suddenly so blindingly, brutally beautiful again. A decade younger and looking it, without the marks of age and violence, smoky eyes and lethal curves.

He's always been male to her, she's crushed on and is occasionally still attracted to Sasuke the man, but while she knows they want him in any incarnation, he's much more of a sex object to Naruto and Kakashi (_to men_) when he's a girl.

Naruto's obvious, as always; the gleam to his eyes, the way he _looks_ like looking is a touch. Gently he puts Rina down, gaze glued to the subtle line of Sasuke's thigh melting into hip. She can practically see the blood pounding southward through his body.

My dear stupid boy, what are you, a teenager still?

Beside her, closest to Sasuke, Kakashi has gone still and intent above the lazy smirk. Of course you want him, you've always wanted him, and Naruto at least knows he'll get…

Itachi has frozen behind her and is staring staring _staring_.

Sasuke ignores them, had expected to feel hateful, trapped again in this woman's body. But flesh is just flesh, and he has gone far enough beyond that to be comfortable in different guises.

(if i were tall and whither than death with a tongue that could wind itself around me, i'd lose it)

This is nothing.

"Father?" Rina asks, still incredulous. Feeling their gazes, the hot attention sweeping along his movement, he crouches easily, on eye-level with the girl.

"Yup. Told you." The kind of stupid phrases Naruto uses, that never fail to make her smile.

He leans forward, scoops her up, sweeps her with him as he stands. This body was made to have children; she's distraction, fitted perfectly in his arms, a shield against thoughts he does not want, stares that are affecting him the wrong way.

"Maybe we should go," Sakura says, holding out her arms for Rina. "Here, I'll take her."

This isn't Itachi, Sasuke reminds himself. _This one isn't mine, and all the better for it._

Handing her over (itachi never squirmed, he either froze completely or buried himself against the warmth, two versions of desperation) his attention is drawn, inevitably and needy, to Kakashi. This beautiful aging man that he – that I've loved since I was twelve.

We all have.

"I'm open-minded about living arrangements," Itachi says in a voice that is absolutely neutral and controlled (can't take his eyes away, not a chance, god, i know i should, i know, i can't). "I like staying with Kakashi-sensei; I don't have to. I don't enjoy the idea of inhabiting the Haruno household; I can deal." _I need to go now._

Because the world is still this strange place when he forces himself into motion, preceding Sakura-san out the door. Stops outside the apartment, and it's so weird, so weird that everything looks the same, because nothing is.

In the absence inside, in the thickness of _too much never enough_, with the girls and the boy gone, Sasuke turns the little bit that's necessary and leans into Kakashi. His face pressed against the old chest (he's thrity-nine), arms locked so hard they shake around the sharp waistline.

I've used you so much, and I can't give what I take, this isn't a proper exchange.

(some things are alright when you're a girl of fifteen that would not be acceptable for a man of twenty-six)

Kakashi's lean arms are careful around him, the large hands, one of them missing a pinkie, covering most of his back, stretched like wings from shoulder-blade to hip, across ribs and spine and sinew.

I was born when I was fifteen. You're the only father I've ever had. I don't want any other.

(he's also the only father your son has ever known, but hey, you never said you weren't fucked up, the lot of you)

Naruto looks at them, more tender than disturbed, strangely not jealous (or if i am, not of kakashi). The silver head is bowed over Sasuke's, sharp nose drowning in black hair; when at length he looks up a little, wry gray eye meeting raw blue, there's – a disconcerting realization. Naruto steps forward, places a palm on Kakashi's upper arm, curls gentle fingers 'round the nape of Sasuke's neck.

Gray meeting blue meeting black, round and round, and the warm, anti-climatic knowledge they could. We both do love you Sasuke, and we know you want both of us, and we love each other, never any doubt there, if not in that way, and it could be us, all of us.

If it has to be. We could make that work.

Not for my sake, Sasuke decides. Kisses Kakashi, slow and deep and ardent, one hand clutching at Naruto's shirt, right over his heart.

Witnessing it is strange, but he's seen Sasuke kiss Sakura-chan, hell, he's seen Sasuke _sleep with_ Sakura-chan, and that was weirder (hot as hell, too). That whole experience was alien, like it happened in another world, a pocket of space that time forgot, and they were so far removed from reality. Just touching, clinging to each other, laughing softly, mumbling, holding gazes. Reaching past embarrassment and jealousy and old betrayals and regrets, that once and never again. He won't ever regret it.

But yeah, strange but not _so_ strange to stand in a kitchen that could use some cleaning, feeling warm and lazy and content, fighting to hold on to those benevolent emotions past the raspy burn that might or might not be Kyuubi acting up, connected to Sasuke, reaching for Kakashi, as his boyfriend and his teacher kiss.

Absurdly, it is only when they mentally step back, intensity muted, that he recalls Sasuke is employing the Oiroke no Jutsu.

(the first time they had sex, in a disused storage room in the central tower of the forest of death; caressing a want to mark over sasuke's skin, and the clumsy kisses and the searing pleasure that knocked him out far too soon)

(locked in the memory of the night rina-chan was conceived, him and sasuke and sakura-chan, team seven under fey starlight on the moors, like some kind of happy campers, sasuke's hand beautifully shameless on his back, mouth on sakura-chan, naruto moving in her; hot skin, arms cradling his body, reaching out, drawing close, holding on and holding tight)

(he is suddenly and starkly, absolutely, convinced that rina-chan is sasuke's)

(not that it matters much)

"How do we fix this, then?" he finally asks, breaking the quiet before it can break them. "Itachi was pretty clear on where he stands, but," shrug, "I dunno."

His hand glides down Kakashi's arm and away, tingling against strong fingers; their mutual clasp is fast, over before it happens. He remembers Kakashi's arms tight and caring, restraining him during the Preliminary Matches when Gaara had crushed Rock Lee.

I don't want to, he thinks with a shared smile un/familiar as Sasuke's female shape. But I could.

That makes all the difference in the world.

There is great hesitancy; maybe they'd better try this out step by step. Separation anxiety is palpable and mutual. Kakashi shrugs at one point, mentioning Anko's apartment will have space over now Hanabi's gone; he might camp there, on and off.

"I, um," Naruto starts, brash and blushing. It's not my business, but it could be. Everything could be (i'm going to become hokage! i'll bring sasuke back! it's the promise of a lifetime). "Is she your girlfriend or what? Like, does she know you're cheating on her?"

_Do I need to be discreet? Could I kiss you in the street? Mad thought, I never will, but I could, I could._

"She's been sleeping with Hanabi for years," Kakashi says, amused, hurt. "The only girlfriend I've ever had who would've been jealous, the only girlfriend I've _ever_ had, that's Rin."

And she died years ago, and she was never mine, she only wanted to be, I took her because Obito wasn't there, he couldn't.

Because no one was there anymore (dad went first, then mom, obito, the fourth, rin), everyone I ever had gone.

_The king is dead; all hail the king! Team Seven is dead; Team Seven is alive, all hail._

Naruto nods.

When I was twelve I wanted Sakura-chan for my girlfriend.

What a fool I was, even though I'd seen Sasuke – bloody brilliant, with a killer smirk and eyes of sin, never been any color but black, no curse seal on that perfect white neck that maybe even then I wanted to lick.

Oiroke no Jutsu isn't the only transformation technique there is, so... but no; he deliberates briefly – but I don't want an illusion, I can have the real thing. I do have the real thing.

(don't i?)

xxxxxxxxxx


	51. Red Thread

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 51:**

"**Red Thread"**

Gaara in his study; an incongruous sight. He is deep in deliberation, no hallucinations this time.

Today his lady wife is scheduled to arrive. Mother doesn't think she'll like the girl, but Kankurou is pleased. Most everyone is pleased about this Hyuuga Hanabi, prodigy kunoichi, Leaf princess (the wedding is good excuse for rebellious elements to show up and bow without losing too much face).

If he had to get married he wanted Naruto, but at least it is not Uchiha. A girl five years his junior, with eyes that can see through stone, straight to the heart of things. He thinks that that intimidates him a little. He also anticipates it, the gaze that will be blank from seeing everything.

Idly, he wonders what she will think of the desert. The landscape of trees and waters from which she originates is utterly foreign to him, must foster a people different from the children raised by the harsh heat of his desert.

"Gaara." Kankurou's voice, thick and composed.

He nods, standing. "It is time?"

It is, and they descend the old staircase winding around the outside of the building, down onto the platform built for the occasion. Adhering to his brother's gesture, Gaara seats himself on the padded stool in the middle of it, lets his disinterested gaze sweep past the closest assembly (advisers, councilors, the higher ranked ninja and the anbu guard he will never need) and to the people below, the dirty, starved scavengers crowding the still partially demolished, badly dilapidated streets.

Someone has leaked the rumor the Leaf Bride will be bringing food for her dowry. Gaara does not know whether this information is accurate, but rather hopes it is.

Sound is muted but definitely present below them; he is fairly gratified to find it is not hostile. Certainly not happy whispers, no shouts of elation, but not hostile. A small step, but a necessary one none the less.

At length (i am not sure how long i waited, but i have waited all my life, though not for this) the Leaf party arrives. Their numbers are scarce; supposedly they too must have had their population shrunk by the long war. ANBU of both Leaf and Sand origin, and two that he thinks might be Sound (you killed my father, you bastards. thanks) and what has to be the girl. Long strides carry her forward fast, unhindered by the pale kimono, through the crowd, never looking sideways, to the platform and up the steps to it.

Belatedly he rises, steps forward to extend a hand.

If he fancied for even a second that Naruto was typical of Leaf ninja, and already Uchiha should have taken that illusion from him, he was gravely mistaken. Her hand is reddish with sunburn, fleshy when compared to the starved Sand denizens but not by much. She looks cold, with the pale hair and pale eyes, the inscrutable face.

Because he needs to imprint it into his consciousness that this is not a fight, and thus should not concentrate on her chakra (high level, tightly controlled, bloodline limit eyes activated) or her movements (silent, graceful). At first he thinks the mark close to the left edge of her mouth is a dimple, but when she steps up close, face perfectly on a level with his own, he discovers it is a scar, likely related to the thin white line gracing her lower lip and continuing over her chin, down her throat.

"I welcome you," he says, making his voice carry over the now silent masses, not quite lying. "My," short stop, long breath, "bride."

She inclines her head, not deeply enough, elegant and childish, makes an off-hand gesture that has her escort approach stationed Sand ANBU with several chests – the food he was hoping for? Probably, just don't sell the skin until you've killed the bear.

Together they retire into the Kazekage Palace, most of its towers erect again now, walking side by side, not looking at each other (does she need to look at him to see him? his knowledge of the byakugan is less extensive than it ought to be). Hidden from the masses, Kankurou approaches them, leads his brother and the Hyuuga bride and certain other grand names into a room prepared for the occasion.

"A pleasure," the puppet master says, nodding greeting, with the tones and the smile that declare he is being genuine.

She returns the gesture without comment, her gaze remarkably not lingering on the damage Kankurou's face has sustained (with tree hundred and sixty degrees vision, why should it need to?), accepting his offered hand without hesitation.

Gaara watches, strangely abstracted, mentally muttering back to Mother; Kankurou clearly gleans his situation and continues the few-worded conversation with Hanabi. Yes, Hanabi, Hyuuga Hanabi, that is her name.

"Correct," she says, from across a great divide. "The chests contain foodstuffs. Durable kinds. A gift from the Hokage, with contributions from the Sound Council."

Later in the afternoon she is standing beside the Kazekage on the dais outside, the sun utterly merciless overhead, red as the designs on Akatsuki cloaks.

She is in the desert. Here everyone can see for miles around, because there is nothing to be seen.

The appropriate hallowed phrases were memorized days ago, by both of them; they stutter out the old-fashioned words, mouths clumsy as no ninja limb should ever be.

Facing forward, impassively receiving the official's sermon, she Byakugan-watches the man beside her, the dwarfish redheaded creature who contains the Ichibi.

"Yes," she says, clear as crystal (_not brittle_). "I do."

The feast is as close to sumptuous as is possible, in a village suffering the after-effects of civil war and famine. Little enough touches her palate, as she's had small appetite for the last long years. Food is just fuel, and the less you need, the better off you are.

Finally, in the alien desert sunset, they are escorted to the private quarters of the Kazekage, left with just each other in the bedroom. Head tilted to the side, she takes stock; large windows with thick draperies, an antique bed, not a futon. White linen that will not receive any maiden's blood tonight (lost that to a training exercise when she was but a little girl).

Without words she starts removing her clothing, unknots the obi and puts it away.

"Gaara?" Because he's just standing there, his back against the wall close to the door, expression strange under the kanji she already hates.

"Ah?" He looks up, into her face – and they are both painfully neutral, and uncomfortable. "I never have, before."

"I see," she replies. "I believe it is in the contract."

Probably, he nods, he too undoing clasps, slipping free from thick layers of fabric. He leaves Mother watching over them there by the locked door.

Every time he has _thought_ (heat, yearning, god, could someone _touch_) he has ended up with Naruto's name ghosting past his swollen lips.

Stepping out of his pants, he watches her kimono fall to the floor, leaving this strange impression of a doll. Her legs could be joints on any of Kankurou's murder puppets, and her flesh-body too is dollish; artificial, intended for use.

They look at each other, repeating the steps (jiraiya's sweat in the dirty room, the taste of liquor from his tongue, touch, taking, swallow and close your eyes); ('see, now, this doll does this, the other reacts like that… you get it?').

It is only much later, with linen scratching against his slick back, gasping, that he realizes the impossible: "You're not afraid of me."

She smiles, for the first time, and it's actually – he rather likes it. Not as much as he likes the way she moves a little, which sets his nerves firing, breath hissing, thoughts cascading into each other, ecstasy – anxiety – _panic_, red-hot, death-heavy, consciousness falling apart like a mountain of sand from the roar of liberated instinct, dubbed Shukaku.

"No," she says. And: "I am not afraid of anything."

After that it isn't Naruto's name he says, every time the world shatters into flame.

xxxxx

"Hello," Kankurou says – politeness, unnecessary announcement. You get used to warning for your presence, when among allies in a war. "How are you?"

"Hello," she repeats, sitting in a niche, sunlight on her hair, shadows protecting the mildly scalded skin of face and arms. "I'm fine."

He looks her over: there are some bandages here and there, stitches across her shoulder, but the marks are not so bad as to force her into baggy garments. Her feet are bare, beige-panted metal constructs.

Contemplating swiftly, cunning and daring as any successful battle commander, he rests a warm maimed hand on one of them.

"I'm a puppet master. I'd be interested in working with you on this matter."

"Yeah?" Her alien face offers a faint hint of a smile. "I'd like that."

"But," he doesn't remove his touch, not quite yet, "it went okay?"

"It did." She shrugs, rippling the stitches. "The healers say it's not a problem; I didn't think it was." A minimalist expression he can't decipher. "Anyone could predict Ichibi would act up, when Gaara lost control. I dealt with it."

"You certainly did." Sealed tenketsu until Shukaku almost exploded Gaara's skull in frustration; the demon will have to learn to be more cautious, or it'll kill its host – kill itself.

"Why did you agree to this?" he asks impulsively, honestly curious all of a sudden. Maimed princess, my darling, our savior. "I mean, of course I comprehend the reasoning at large, but I was made to understand you raised not the slightest objection."

And Leaf does not force, does not threaten. Not Naruto's village (don't let that change).

"Why should I? I was the obvious candidate." Her smirk turns introvert for a second before she offers, lighter now. "I like your sister. She sent some things with me for you." Reaching inside her discarded robe, protection for skin unused to the relentless desert sun should she venture outside, she liberates a leather folder and hands it over.

_With all my love_. This is Temari, so the phrase is nowhere in evidence, but you might consider it implicit in stacks of documentation detailing excellent info and progress, offers and deals.

Not to mention the personal letters, from her and from Sara (my niece, my god), the blurry photos of a little girl with a smile wide as victory and shaggy blond hair.

"I'm glad," he says, almost choked (where's my makeup when i need it? but it infected his ruined nose, he had to quit and has never taken it up again, for one reason or another).

xxxxx

He watches from a window, high in the tower of loneliness, a Rapunzel with short-cropped hair, as his brother trains with his wife on the courtyard down below.

They are in plain sight, moving fast, and he thinks he hears the tinkling, hesitant sound of a short laugh. A bark, sweet as dew.

I am eleven weeks married. The country is calmly ecstatic.

The_ Princess_ sent to slay the _Dragon_ and save the _Prince_.

He does not feel he needs to be rescued. Naruto showed him that. Still, it'd be nice for someone to try.

(for myself to succeed, as i will, as i do, slowly and steadily, a grinding year of sanity adding to the last, on and on, circles)

The elders have died, and most of the Council is new; green, uncertain. Gaara will fight for them, will give them ideology and conviction and a struggle to the last, his life if need be, but he cannot provide for their everyday needs. There is not within his capability to plan, reckless political strategy dancing elegantly with patch-work solutions, brilliant feats and long-term achievements.

(there is within me a demon god, and a beating heart, blood like yours, and lungs that draw breath)

For almost as long as he can remember, his brother has run the operation. Kankurou is no longer alone in that. After all, Gaara's wife was raised a prospective heir of the Hyuuga Clan, a prospective Hokage in the making.

And he does trust her, as long as Kankurou is overseeing her decisions, and so clearly happy with it, even when they're arguing. Once they actually screamed at each other; it's the only time he's seen his chilly young wife upset.

Being married isn't so bad. You'd think it'd be intrusive because the participants might be regarded as having to be close, but such is not necessarily the case.

If nothing else, he warily enjoys attempting to procreate. They've learned which jutsu to use to keep Ichibi pliant, when it's necessary to block his chakra – it's basically a safe procedure.

He watches, quietly. Outside, flesh meets flesh, and laughter.

xxxxx

Hokage-sama,

Trouble abroad. Can't read Gaara too well, but I think he's pretty satisfied with the current state of affairs (he asked about naruto, i gave him good news, so be prepared to lie). Temari and Kankurou are particularly happy to be reunited; both her uncles have taken well to Sara.

It's pretty clear it's the wife and brother who run the country, and that it's the two of them who are actually

Ah, it's more or less safe, at least inside the village. No wonder, of course, ten months after reconstruction began.

There have been rumors of a pregnancy; I haven't had them confirmed. Nine months' marriage, yes, and it's pretty evident they do manage to consummate it, but she's still thin as a stick, I doubt she's bleeding properly. Though food's getting more plentiful, they shouldn't have to starve this year. Probably we can make good profit, guarding merchants from Fire Country.

–Nara Shikamaru, Registered Chuunin of the Hidden Village of Leaf

xxxxx

"Hello." Perhaps a redundant thing to say to your wife, but a workable greeting.

She looks up, a polite unnecessary movement, offers a smile. It's an expression she's cultivated, that comes to her fairly easily these days; she cannot remember it ever would, in Leaf (except _before_, but that is not real to her anymore).

Under his customary peculiar, childishly steady gaze she sits back in the large stuffed chair, away from the desk crowded with documents and crowned by one of Kankurou's puppets, no larger than a foot, which she is continually manipulating. It danced jerkily across the room while she approved a trading contract.

Good practice.

"It's very sunny today," he says.

"Why are you here?" Technically it is his office, but she left the three reunited siblings alone with pointed politeness less than twenty minutes ago.

He shrugs, uncomfortable. You do not lie to your spouse, he was told long ago. He supposes he'd better adhere. This is for the village, after all, and he rather likes her, as people go.

"Things are complicated."

"They usually are," she agrees. "Families especially."

"Will we have one?" It is asked in a tone of acute confusion.

"I suppose we should."

She must see he is upset, appalled at the nearness displayed downstairs by his sister and brother, envious of it as well.

He thinks of Sara, bright smiles, bright eyes. Could we have a child like that?

She looks a little amused and very blank but stands obediently, fingers lingering suggestively at the edge of her tank top, where it does not quite meet the hem of her pants. "Is that a proposition?"

"I – perhaps."

"Alright." Her eyes go distant, veiny (she is looking at the son of the kazekage that orochimaru assassinated. she is not looking at her husband). "There's no one in the vicinity."

Rustle of clothes, soft groans, sharp hisses.

"Do you still think of Naruto when we do this?" The question is asked without passion, in a spirit of absent curiosity. There is no nastiness in it.

He shifts a little on the floor, feeling the hardness of her metal leg against his shin, light fingertips catching in his sweaty hair. "Sometimes," he offers. "Not often, anymore."

(i think about you)

It leads him to a question, that languid line of thought; he has little experience, no real way of knowing whether she likes what they do, whether she hates it or enjoys it or doesn't care. "Do you? Think about somebody else."

"Does it upset you, if I do?"

He contemplates, startled. "No."

"Then yes, I suppose I do."

_Don't ask, don't tell_.

Actually it's sort of romantic; sometimes she imagines she is Naruto. Being helpless does not turn her on – she has always wanted to be the one to sweep in and save the princess, the brutal warrior on the blood-splattered white horse. The victor.

Besides, she's considered Sasuke hot since she was ten.

She thinks about that, and moves with Gaara, and watches Kankurou exchange upset words and tender glances with Temari.

xxxxx

"Hiya."

"Hello."

And they look at each other. It's all we can do (for now and ever?).

(castles made of sand)

"They have successfully departed, then?"

He nods, "They have."

They haven't seen each other much, during the long visit from Leaf.

Once, in a hallway when Sara had lost her way and he'd offered to look for her – and found her with Hanabi, little girl and larger. His sister-in-law bent down, offered an unaccustomedly uncertain smile, finally hefted the child. Sara sniffed, having apparently scratched her knee quite badly, looking large and bright.

Not that he noticed (until afterwards, when i went over the memory again and again with compulsion).

Hanabi, white and thin, with the child in her arms and a wry smile in his direction.

_It's too late. It hasn't even begun, it cannot begin, and it's too late._

The phantom echo of a part long lost was _pounding._ Still is.

The child was traded, given into his large maimed hands without complaint. He could not speak; she would not.

That was then. They've talked now, if little.

Deliberate, dainty, she catches his hand with her fingers. Coarse skin strokes across his digits, a warm skeleton hand holding him mesmerized, prodding like a bird's beak at the stumps of what was his left middle and ring fingers.

Fine symbolism, there.

"I'm surprised you did not have these replaced."

"There was never the time. When there was, years later, they'd healed, I'd grown used to it."

Her other hand moves to his face, ethereal as a dandelion seed her nail ghosts over his twice-broken nose, past the scarred mouth with the missing teeth she must be able to see, anytime she wants, through his closed lips.

Grown used to it?

Not anymore.

"Gaara didn't take it too badly, did he? I was occupied with Temari and Sara – he retreated into himself a great deal...?"

"He's alright," she dismisses, removing her hand from his face but not her fingers from around his. "It's just the usual complications with him and the concept of family."

"Ah. You're much the same, aren't you? Uncannily talented younger sibling…" It's only half a tease, a little wistful.

She purses her lips, looking a childish granny. "I too killed my mother merely by entering into this world."

"That's not true," he says, husky. "Not for you and not for Gaara either. They died, but that's not the same as you killing them."

"It's a point of view."

"You're so much like each other," he says again, to remind himself. "Crazy prodigies, traumatized, with royally fucked-up backgrounds..."

"I was never scorned," she points out, sharp enough. "My family loved me, in their way." Her mouth forms a strange shape. "I do not feel alone or traumatized now."

It's true she's looking better than when she arrived, almost a year ago. She's smiling more, has gained several pounds and a reddish tan.

Perfect is a cold, precise word, and he feels it is not the only adjective fit to describe her anymore.

(watching them from the far end of the corridor, unnoticed, gaara does not speak)

xxxxx

After fifteen months of marriage Hanabi suffers a miscarriage. Supposedly she's in no danger, was only ten weeks along.

She shouldn't have lost it. There is no reason why she would have tripped, did not block properly, fell – why she felt she could not have the baby, and acted accordingly, subconsciously or not.

Lying in the dim bedchamber, she does not feel incapacitated. The dizzy weakness that accompanies shocked blood-loss has receded, though a thin trickle of redness still seeps from her. I am bored.

Aching, in some inconceivable inside way.

Gaara is fiddling with something in the outside room, murmuring with the lost child's alleged grandmother. Every one of the councilors and midwives where in touching agreement that it was for the best that the Kazekage be kept away from the unfortunate business. Blood tends to excite Ichibi, confuse the demon's host, and Hanabi is not in any condition to fight him.

There's really no one else who can, with any hope of success.

This means that the man impatiently forcing his way through the attendants is her brother-in-law. He jerks the door open, ignorant of the rising tide of protests, slams it decisively shut behind him.

Her hair is blindingly white against the pillow, a beacon.

He stumbles forward on irresistible momentum, landing on the bedside, feeling the luxurious mattress dip under his weight. She eases herself up on an elbow, collapses to half-sit.

And once again they are staring, and her meager body warmth is reaching out to embrace him.

"Why? Why didn't you tell me! Why did you need to…?"

"Is that of any importance?" What's done is done, isn't it?

('_holy shit. you're lusting after gaara's wife.'_

'_temari. i'm a bloody enuch. who i want to fuck is of no particular consequence'_)

"Yes it damn well is, you stupid girl. You could have hurt yourself!"

Her eyes are ordinary and luminous. For the first time she looks tragic, in a romantic sense of the word.

She doesn't say: Because I want my children to be yours.

It cannot begin, but there's a palm cupping the nape of his neck and he is not fighting it, not at all.

This is impossible.

He thought he knew what he lost, when they took his manhood from him, was neither a child nor a virgin, felt it didn't signal the end of the world, wasn't as important as they seemed to think. Frustrating, painful, but at least he'd lived, before, and lives still, and learned to live with the handicap.

How wrong I was.

In another world he leans forward, closes the gap, and there is warmth and softness between them, she's on her back, he eases inside, they push each other upward, into something brilliant.

There is no world for us to have but this one.

Even if it were not physically impossible, they could never. We both know that.

Her wrist still hangs weakly around his neck; he relaxes into the touch.

"I'm glad you're alright."

"I'm glad you're here."

He presses a kiss that masquerades as chaste to her brow; she draws a deep breath, catches the thickly scarred tip of his nose against a soft spot below her ear.

They can never happen.

(we already have)

xxxxx

Gaara is watching events unfold again. It is strange; he is not the adviser, not particularly cautious, nor the one equipped with Bloodline Limit eyes.

Despite these striking disqualifications, watching appears to be all he can do. He watched the war, watched the victims struggle and fall, and he is watching now, as others rule his country. He does not mind.

_He presses his mouth to every patch of skin he can reach, raining kisses over her face, under her jaw, below her ears, along every scar. It is not sexual; and then her mouth is open over his, and he thinks he knows what starlight tastes like; their upper bodies are pressed seamlessly into the togetherness, and incautious hands are mapping out roads to paradise. He cannot imagine how he could ever let go of this person he should never hold._

_And that is not me._

He cannot help imagining that which is not a memory, even though he professes he is fine with it.

There is a love story unfolding in the desert. He wishes he were part of it.

Wants to love, and is growing to love the girl whom his brother is utterly taken with, even as, perhaps, they love each other, the brothers.

It is a tale entirely of _almost._

–and almost is never enough, but nearly always it has to suffice.

A love story in the desert. Not Gaara's.

xxxxxxxxxx


	52. With a Bang

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 52:**

"**With a Bang"**

_Happy camper_ (and curse the idiot who got that lame expression stuck on his brain) is not currently a befitting description of Uchiha Itachi, age twelve, presumably the last child of the Sharingan bloodline.

"Big Brother?"

He turns from his contemplation of the Hero Stone, the modest monument to all the lost ones, tries and fails to offer her a reassuring little smile. There's a smile, yes, but it is too darkly brooding, too obviously forced, to ever registered as reassuring.

"Rina-chan."

Hesitation is stark and reluctant in every curve of her face; he makes himself relax, joints aching like those of an elderly man from tension alone, and pats the ground close to him. Smiling brilliantly, concern evident but muted, she sits down beside him, leaning her head against his upper arm. Tall for her age, she's not all that much shorter anymore.

"Itachi-niisan…?"

"Morino Ibiki died today."

On a mission. I could not protect him.

_I can't even protect myself!_

He stepped into the afterlife in my place.

I will get over it, but not now, not quite yet.

"Oh," she says softly. "I'm sorry." He believes her, though is certain she is sorry he is sad rather than because of the man's untimely demise. After all, Ibiki-sensei was old and harsh, unknown and frightening to her.

He shrugs a little, one-shouldered so as not to disturb her. "Everyone dies. He'd lived long." Forcing his mind from the matter, his eyes from the stone, he turns towards her. "And what have you been up to, young lady? Something special you abandoned your friends to come tell me about?"

Her grin is simple and irrepressible. Did he look like that, ever? He rather thinks not.

"I made the Academy! I'll be attending the proper classes tomorrow!"

Ninja kindergarten is over, she is starting on the road towards becoming a real kunoichi. He remains uncertain as though whether that's actually a very good idea – regardless of everything else, she must learn enough to be able to defend herself against all those who will insist on fighting her, should she develop the Sharingan, but it's not a profession he can see giving her much satisfaction.

As for himself, he could not have lived with being powerless and forever protected (not like i'm not, anyway, and gods, it grates) but she thinks differently.

You human, I ninja.

Save he feels horribly human right now – it's humans alone who can mourn their lack of humanity, isn't it?

Besides, there is tenderness, a horrible gnawing guilt, and …something he does not want to acknowledge. Fuck being an adolescent. The gangly growth, the stupid hormones souring his mood and infesting his dreams.

Already before he turned four he had a rudimentary comprehension of the tangled relationships between adults, could act into them, but vainly he did not believe he would ever be caught in the web.

(when desire came it wore unsuitable faces)

He turns his mind from this, keeps his gaze decisively off the stone, slinging an arm over Rina-chan's shoulders. The appropriate expressions of pride and happiness are well received; he's never understood it, how he can be so cherished merely through existing. How the offer, _I'm your brother_, can be so naturally, glowingly answered: _I'm your sister!_

If only certain other things could be half a simple as she is.

He's a good responsible elder sibling and drops her off at Sakura-san's with a promise to look over her kunai-throwing tomorrow afternoon, ventures home very slowly.

To his dismayed surprise, he practically collides with Naruto in the doorway; a panicked blue glance his way, and the red-orange blur is gone.

The hell…?

He hurries inside carefully, spotting a familiar dark head in the kitchen. Realizing, as he comes closer, that Naruto must be off to fetch Sakura-san, and why that is necessary.

"Sasuke," he hisses.

"It's fine."

No it's not. It's not fine my parent, my safety, the one person I love absolutely, is _bleeding into the sink_.

Itachi catalogues the damage absently, moving through the room, his feet strangely heavy, his head strangely light: fat lip bleeding sluggishly, a huge bruise forming on his throat, arm cradled to his chest, a cut splitting fabric and skin down his left thigh. He's too pale, too unsteady.

Plainly Itachi's lack of belief is evident, as thick in the air as in his mouth; Sasuke adds dismissively, "It's nothing."

And it's true, in a sense – were it anyone else, where it _himself_, Itachi would consider the injuries light. But this is Sasuke, and Sasuke is not supposed to be able to get wounded, ever, especially not _at home_ _in our kitchen_.

He finds a towel, hands it over. "Should I?" Heal it?

Sasuke must have attempted to seal the Kyuubi: the apartment is in one piece, which rules out chakra-heavy attacks, and were his energies not strained, he'd have healed himself already. His fingertips would not be blue with straining chakra turning against his own cells.

"Sakura will be here in a minute."

_And she's a trained professional, let her handle it._

Mr. Wife-Beating Asshole returns shortly, a panting and exasperated medic kunoichi in tow. There are a good deal of glances exchanged; Sasuke's eyes cold and slippery, cunning, Sakura-sans's hurt, Naruto's bewildered. Not guilty yet, not angry anymore.

There lingers a touch of red to them, and to Sasuke's.

Itachi swallow as unobtrusively as he can, hoping for and absolutely dreading a dismissal that doesn't come.

He's pretty certain Naruto would like for it to, but Itachi is an adult now, and if he's staying with them he deserves to know, and anyway Naruto is not in a position to tell anyone to do anything.

There is a dully worded explanation, directed at Sakura-san, who can demand things: the seal's slipping, it's been for some time, obviously. Seals do that, when containing nigh almighty demons. What's unexpected, in light of this one's history, is that it didn't happen with a bang, this time. Just this slight eroding, bit by inevitable, irreparable bit, until a playful bite became hard, and the taste of expensive Uchiha blood in his mouth turned things strange.

(_i have to own you_)

The sudden, utterly unexpected twist; and Sasuke stared straight ahead, skin splitting like the layers of reality. Neither one of them should have been caught off guard.

"Sealing?" Sakura inquires, healing the last bit of the cut along Sasuke's thigh under Naruto's shamefully reluctant look; he doesn't want the desire to have the flesh laid continually bare to him, can't shake it off.

"I tried." Sasuke says the words like they're the worst curse in existence.

It won't work. Kyuubi is too free now, has grown used to the seals, seeped deeply, deeply into Naruto's psyche.

Hopefully the process has been gradual enough this time that you can handle it, Sakura thinks. You'd better, because there's nothing we can do.

Itachi bites his lip and stares wary hatred at all of them.

xxxxx

_Hanabi, Gaara, I…_

_Mother, Father, Temari, Gaara, Hanabi, I – am dying, at long last._

That much has been rather regrettably clear to him from the moment he saw his men being downed swiftly, like ripe grain falling for the farmer's glaive, and spotted the swirling red-black cloaks worn by their killers.

I am over.

I have had a full life. Much sun, much rain. He does not want to complain.

It hurts, almost more than anything. He's had some brief healer training and absently traces the searing agony inside him to busted internal organs leaking vile fluids into the rest of his body. He will not last; went down with little fight, because he is aging before his time, maimed and lost to much hope.

He's tried his best, and has loved much in his life; this desert that he knew from almost the start would ultimately destroy him, and the people that he met in it.

The awareness is with him that he is being carried; the rough, rocking motions beneath him. When his carriers' steps get faster, accompanied by the screaming of metal and flesh, he opens eyes whose closing he had not noticed.

His men are being killed, again. The sight has haunted him often enough, before and during and after the war, but he has only once before seen it happen inside the Kazekage Palace.

Oh, well, shit.

Anxiety has left him, departed along with his left arm: it is over, I am dead, and so are these Akatsuki, the moment the set foot in the presence of my loved ones. Gaara will snap, will destroy them utterly; so close to his end, Kankurou does not allow himself to doubt that Hanabi will stop him, after he is done.

Everything will turn out alright, in the end if not in the beginning.

_I loved you. Love both of you. Live on for me, as happy as you can be._

A harsh request, perhaps, but he would have done it, _has_ complied with it often enough.

Circle's end – and isn't that funny: there's no such thing. Circles are defined by their lack of endings.

Death claims him then, so swiftly he does not see the two pairs of eyes, white and green, widening as his body is dropped to the floor.

A peculiarity; a moment cut out of time.

Gaara watches his brother's dead body falling at his feet. Hanabi stares at her Genin team falling infinitely.

They knew this was under way, but they never could have thought… Distracted, she did not use the Byakugan until it was too late.

She needs no Bloodline Limit to know what she is seeing now.

Activates it anyway, too look inside the flesh that was once Kankurou's, and so hers. "Mist and Rock ninja," she reports tonelessly. "Crowding the village. Our numbers are greater, but only when including the civilians."

The Akatsuki leer at them from across the room.

"I did learn to love, I think," Gaara says, preternaturally calm, a wounded child's tranquility.

(thank you for that, both of you. goodbye, hanabi. kankurou, wait up, alright)

She is not going to stop him this time.

Shukaku breaks through in a single violent rush, divine power made demonic.

None can stand before It.

Gaara drowns inside the maelstrom; knew when he let it spring forth that he'd sink long before he could learn to swim.

He smiles sardonically, in his mind: _Goodbye, cruel world. We had quite some chemistry going there, you and I, in the end._

xxxxx

She lays Kankurou's body down gently. Pointless courtesy, as the laconic check she performed merely served to confirm his passing.

He might not be the only one in the family to leave this world behind today; the Akatsuki, once so cocky, are debris, scattered redness.

Past them, Byakugan deactivated, she meets the blood-shot golden eyes of a demon god and – realizes.

Gaara is gone already, gone as Kankurou and the shabby paradise they were building.

Alright, then. She is aware of what she was sent to the desert to accomplish.

The princess and the dragon she is to slay, except the princes have already been massacred.

Well. Revenge is something, at least. (necessary?)

Closure, perhaps, of a kind.

All that's left to her.

xxxxx

"Kakashi-sensei?"

"Ah?"

"It's nothing. Leave me alone. I mean, you don't have to stick around."

Teenagers! "I don't mind," he says, mildly, unruffled. Wishing this was no worse than normal teenage hormonal angst, but of course it cannot be that simple, not for Team Seven or its spawn.

"I…" Itachi says at last, a sharp, breathy sound. So narcissistically caught up in his own misery. "I can't talk about it."

"I know."

The child turns partially, offers a grim, sarcastic smirk.

You know what it is I cannot speak of, yes, I am aware of this.

"Jesus," Kakashi mutters, ruffling the black hair. "It might ease, with time."

"I don't think so," Itachi says, then obviously realizes he sounds a petulant adolescent, a defiant kid. He offers a sickly attempt at a smile. "I hope so."

It is apparent they are both well aware Kakashi will not breathe a word of this issue to the other parties concerned. Kakashi is ready to bet, though, that the kid doesn't realize the _why_ of this, on Kakashi's part. Probably he attributes it to a kinder, more protective nature than Kakashi possesses, perhaps sprinkled with more realistic expectations of discretion and a certain possessiveness about his too-rare sources of amusement.

Itachi is convinced his home life would be destroyed if the secret leaked, that he'd – it does not bear pondering, and yet he cannot stop.

In reality Kakashi is quietly certain Sasuke wouldn't have any unsolvable problems with the issue, which is the worst of all and the safest insurance to keep him quiet. Naruto would be sickened and mad, but Kyuubi rages often and they've all learned to deal.

(_when desire came to him it wore an unsuitable face_)

"You know…" Itachi starts, gaze distant, out the window. Gradually he uncurls from his defensive, miserable position. "I'm sorry, but there's something I feel I need to – _would like _to try."

Letting him isn't a conscious decision. Itachi is quick as a snake, fast as the Chidori cutting through lightning, and not as easy as all that to predict; Kakashi is what he is, and Copy Ninja is a part of that identity, but so is 'very battered man fewer years than he'd like from his fortieth birthday'.

It is so very different and so very much like what Sasuke did, before the Chuunin Exam he failed so spectacularly.

Life works like that, it sometimes appears, in ironical motions trying and failing to be circles.

"This isn't what you want," he says, wishing he had his mask, when Itachi's face is a safe distance away again.

"It'd be easier if it were," Itachi claims, sounding a little less unhappy, soft lips flushed an ignored pink nuance.

"Really?" Kakashi asks laconically, letting his doubt shine through loud and clear. The kid can't honestly think Kakashi would let him, can he? Or worse, that Kakashi would ever actually be _interested_… can he?

A faint smirk, too melancholic to be mean, and Itachi explains, in a calm, serious tone, like someone who's thought the matter through both once and twice, "Well, you are older, but not by that much. Age doesn't matter very much. Besides, you can't mind your partners being younger, or you wouldn't be interested in Sasuke, particularly when he was younger. I know that you – what you feel about him, but you're sort of the other woman, you both have other affairs." He tilts his head, with a dangerous, self-satisfied smirk that Kakashi is too old not to internally laugh at. "Besides, I'm told I look just like my parents. I should have had a good chance."

"Don't do that again," Kakashi tells him with a distracted air. A denial wouldn't be believed, huh? No point voicing it, then.

Itachi doesn't answer, but then he doesn't have to. Kakashi's been a child-man for far too long not to read him as easily and familiarly as he does his first _Icha Icha Paradise_ volume.

_It'd be easier if it were._

Yes and no, because Kakashi would never, and the one Itachi wants could probably be persuaded.

"Good thing you've seen the Oiroke no Jutsu," Kakashi remarks lightly. "Sasuke would have kittens if you didn't make sure the clan survived into further generations."

"I don't think I want children."

"You're thirteen."

"Yes, well. It's duty. But maybe I… Anyway, that's not a problem, I think. Girls are nice. I mean. Comparatively. Some of them."

_Ah_, Kakashi thinks. So it was the female version that made you realize. Unsurprising, really, though no less of a mess.

(so very few people itachi can relate to, at all. makes for a damn poor selection, in these pursuits)

He'll mop it up afterwards, if he needs to, if he can.

Will have to, if he can't prevent the shit from hitting the fan with a big fat stinking smack, but Itachi is a shy kid, in his way, and observant as other concerned parties may be, they ought to be very reluctant indeed to have this particular epiphany.

"It'll be easier," he offers. "Sometime. It usually is. You grow through it, learn to deal."

It's the best there is on offer, for these sorts of things.

xxxxx

"Hokage-sama?" Temari inquires politely, rubbing uselessly at a wet spot on her dress: she was summoned in a hurry far too desperate to allow her to change from the clothing she wore during the water fight with Sara.

"A moment, please," the Hokage says, and the politeness chills Temari to the bones, lies there inside like a leaden untouchable heaviness. "We're waiting for someone."

Seconds trickle past, erratic as her heartbeat, before the door is pushed open, admitting a carefully blank Hyuuga Neji.

"Right then," the Slug Master intones weightily. "I regret to say I have received some unfortunate tidings from Sand."

The world whites out around Temari as the Sannin continues speaking, listing disasters in a strained, bland voice. Whites out, and pulses around her until she does not know up from down and feels like gagging.

My home destroyed, overrun and sacked, beyond any conceivable hope of true restoration. Both my brothers slain.

"With your permission," Neji says, absolutely expressionless, "we will depart at once."

Temari comes back to herself to realize that her hands are sweaty, fisted painfully around her arms.

Yes, of course they must go, investigate the rumor Hanabi is still alive.

"Of course," Tsunade-sama replies. "You have leave to bring whomever you see fit."

The Kazekage widow is an exceptionally valuable asset, after all.

Neji bows stiffly; Temari does not even manage that, stumbling after him with an apologetic look at the elder woman, wordlessly admitting that she will vomit if she leans over.

"You know the desert," Neji says, outside, when they are running. "Between that and my Byakugan, I believe we will manage."

"Yes," she agrees, weakly, trying to outrun shock and grief. "Others will only slow us down."

They'd need good trackers, good fighters, and most of those are hard to come by: working, or needing persuasion, or bringing complications, or all of the above.

They bring nothing at all; steal water from a farmhouse and split Neji's larger arsenal between them before they enter the desert.

The desert, which is vast and cold/hot/cold, her birthplace. She will know it until the day she dies and probably beyond that final gate as well; the smell of cooling sand, the sound and rough sensation of your feet sinking into the dunes, when you're tired and your chakra manipulation grows sloppy. When you just need to feel it, be anchored to the earth.

Coming upon their target, she knows before Neji, miraculously. It's all about how the desert sunset _tightens_, how the shapes of the dunes seem suddenly sinister, promising, taunting you with the fact you can't know what lies beyond your field of vision. Her stomach curls inward in desperate anticipation.

Then Neji's eyes focus the right way, and he can see. Can see almost everything.

"This way."

They run again, but not for long.

Find a girl, with white hair and reddish clothing, who does not move from where she lies curled on the ground. At first Temari thinks it's the Byakugan; why should Hanabi need to turn towards them?

But beside her Neji draws a sudden sharp breath and steps unexpectedly forward, kneeling over the – really, Temari thinks with an ashen sort of distance, I shouldn't call her a girl, she's past twenty.

Hanabi does not speak but offers no resistance as her brother-in-law coaxes her into a sitting position; only now does it register on Temari that the younger Hyuuga's Bloodline Limit isn't activated, hasn't been, at all.

And while Hanabi's eyes can see simply astonishingly far and she might have spotted them long since and deactivated her gift, there is still something about that that doesn't fit.

Temari too hastens over to them, stops very close to the two Hyuuga. She's happy to find her voice steady as she asks, "How is she?"

"Moveable," Neji says.

Hanabi interjects, sharply, "I'm _blind._"

Her eyes look fine, but there are other ways through which one might lose one's sight, and Neji, who must be able to perceive that kind of damage, is not refuting her.

Hanabi slaps his hand away, sits up by herself, so poised it breaks the heart. Blood, of course – the red color of her clothing is blood, turned dark by age and the sun's descent.

"Two of my ANBU are in the vicinity, searching for food."

After a moment Neji nods, then clearly remembers the current situation and gives audible confirmation. "Ah. I see them."

"Why'd they leave you?" Temari interjects. More mutiny? Oh my country, have you not fallen far enough…!

"I instructed them to," Hanabi tells her crisply. "I am not helpless, Temari-san."

And Temari can believe that, actually, without any difficulty.

"Mind filling us in on the details?" she asks, light, masking the weight of the words, how they want to paralyze her tongue. "We've only sketchy information."

"Of course," Hanabi says sweetly. The way she spoke when Temari visited with her family, in official situations dealing with idiots. Reporting necessary casualties. "We were caught foolishly unprepared by an Akatsuki-led assault force compromised of roughly a hundred and fifty ninja of chiefly Mist and Rock origin. There had been indications that ought to have been taken more seriously, especially with our village still in such a brittle state. We made a mistake. We paid for it."

Temari has never been able to properly decipher Byakugan eyes, and as she stares now into Hanabi's face, she's glad for it.

"Eventually," Hanabi says, stiltedly, "all things must end. They killed… Kankurou was slain. His body was thrown at our feet." She's on a roll now, forcing the crippled words out. "Gaara lost himself to the Ichibi, didn't fight it. He killed the four Akatsuki, taking some heavy damage. He – could not come back to himself, afterwards." Her fingers twitch around a memory, Gaara's blood as tactile on them as Kankurou's, as her teammates', all those long years ago. "He took my sight before I slew him."

My brothers are gone.

She has enough distance, enough kindness still, to recognize somewhere beyond the stunning blow that she is not the one worst afflicted. She does not have the distance nor the kindness to attribute much importance to this insight.

She knows how Gaara's seal was constructed, particularly after the unexpected Akatsuki sealing during the Civil War. So utterly unlike Naruto's – Gaara's demon given so incomparably greater leeway, and yet less. Her littlest brother could never stop at drawing on the entity's chakra, but must yield himself completely, be overrun, taken by force if need be.

There was only ever one condition: when Gaara dies, so does the Ichibi.

Her childhood has disappeared. Not just the people in it, and the place, but the very idea, the fundament on which her life has been built. Sand has fallen.

Perhaps Hanabi could have held it together, struggling and maimed though she is, the Leaf Princess sent to save them, and having saved them, in so many damning ways, but it is quite clear to Temari that Hanabi has been destroyed.

"I'll wait for the ANBU," Temari says. "You take her home."

xxxxx


	53. Please Take Me Home

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 53:**

"**Please Take Me Home"**

She's light as a bird, like she could fly away any moment.

Depending on the terrain, they alternate between running and carrying. In the desert she simply follows the impression of his chakra, which he takes care to project clearly. Her condition hasn't detoriated, but she's worn thin and still hurt: he shouldn't have let her try this.

But this is Hanabi-san, not Hinata-san, which means there is really nothing he could have done to impose his will on her save employ brute strength, which would not have gone over well and would doubtlessly have been quite a painful experience for the both of them.

She might be stubborn in her arrogance, but stupidity isn't in her, and she's – caring rather less for appearances, of late. There is nothing left to be proud for: they are still well within the desert and its flat terrain when she allows herself to be lifted.

It is strange, honestly, that it does not feel strange at all (was the desert just a dream?): air that smells of trees and water, ground that does not lie flat. Neji's presence, different but only marginally.

"How is my sister?" she asks. "Anko-sensei?"

Preciously little has changed, according this his obedient report. Apparently she has two nephews and a niece now.

"I see," she says, and sleeps. Hasn't been able to, for quite some time.

Eventually, after Temari and the gray-faced ANBU have caught up, he brings her to the Hokage, and the hospital.

"I'll give her eyes a try," Tsunade-sama says. "But it's a delicate procedure. I will need to prepare."

Neji nods in place of Hanabi-san, who is unconscious, and elects to bring her home. She doesn't protest, when she awakens. Like all Hyuuga she is trained to internalize emotion, suffers it alone deep inside; he must admit she puts on a fairly good show of normalcy, but then that might be merely because she has never been very normal.

The children are wary of her; only the eldest son, new to his Genin team, ever approaches, and evidently her very empty eyes frighten him. Understandable, for one used to relying so heavy on the Byakugan.

She could _see sound_, once upon a time. Now she sees nothing.

"Do you mind them?" Hinata asks, kindly and plump, motherly. "The children, I mean. I heard about…"

"The miscarriage," Hanabi fills in. Her expression is hard, she can feel it; but then it almost always is, skin drawn taut over prominent bones. She was something approaching beautiful, for a while, in Sand. During the same period of time when she was something approaching happy, with flesh to fill out her clothes and with loved ones to fulfill something else. "Don't worry. It was a masked abortion."

Sensitive, concerned Hinata does not ask anything more. Leaves her mostly alone, which is what nearly everyone does and which is good.

Anko-sensei visits, but Hanabi does not need her anymore. Her legs may be broken, figuratively speaking, but if she can only walk with the elder woman as a crutch, then she'd rather not, satisfied to wait until she's healed enough to manage on her own; or to die when she fails and falls.

Her father near enough weeps, upon first sight of his ruined darling. He is old, now; Neji is the Acting Head of the Clan, in which no children will ever be Branched again. Hanabi is fine with that.

Once only she activates the seal, staring blindly ahead as Neji screams at her feet. It's the first time anyone can remember hearing that particular sound.

She's not sure why she does it.

Just this strange combination of triggers, the paranoia, the palpable helplessness, and I am so sick of being incompetently protected.

"I'm sorry," she offers, long afterward. "I cannot promise I will not do it again. I will accept retribution."

Neji is Clan Head, not mean-spirited per see. She falls on her knees in a ceremony, feeling nothing, sensing the large assembly around them and dutifully, negligently, accepting formal forgiveness.

It is a gray morning; she is wearing an ash-colored kimono and feels like a corpse. Steps forward to kneel for Neji on gravel the leaves impressions on her knees, feels his condescending, still faintly trembling hand brush acceptance over the crown of her bowed head.

What does it matter?

Almost everyone who has ever mattered is dead.

The Hokage said she'd need time to prepare before she essayed to repair Hanabi's sight – days pass, weeks, months. Time has gone slow but distant, as though it is happening to someone else.

She works missions, much of the time; isn't qualified for S-ranks anymore, not by a long shot, but she's still a Jounin, deservedly. Rock Lee tutors her blind taijutsu; some ninja from Sound teach her techniques based upon noise and hearing.

She lives in darkness in a dark world, but occasionally, with time, she feels it fades into gray, with some slight easing of the enduring ache clinging to her, inside. There is no sunlight anymore, but sometimes she is able to imagine she glimpses a hint of old starlight, bleak and frayed.

xxxxx

Naruto goes to visit her once. Initially he is not admitted, swarmed by a formidable horde of insects, blank eyes staring through him, into the pulsating red core. He swats at them helplessly, trying to avoid the stings, to mute the instinct to squish them.

Autocratic tones issue from behind a pair of elaborate sliding doors, husky and aristocratic, "Explain the fuss."

The insect-servants' sudden palpable stillness, the hushed fear that has overtaken them, is what clues him in; not the voice itself, grown old and rusty from his scant, scattered remembrances; she meant little, though what she symbolized carries great importance. I was allowed to be a prince once, slew her dragon, even if it was too little too late. It was a lost chance, one of his many might-have-beens. A precious one.

"Let him in." What the Leaf princess demands, the Leaf princess is granted. In matters that carry no significance, at any rate.

She is seated sedately, in the fine classic position that kills his toes, turns her head towards him in – not quite the normal way. Not angling her eyes towards him, but her ear.

"Hanabi," he says, moved into stillness, ants crawling underneath his skin. She doesn't invite the pity that wells through him. "I'm sorry. Are you better?" There are certain things that cannot be healed, so let us stay positive, let us concentrate on the parts that might be mended: "The hag's damn slow about it, isn't she?"

This is, after all, her tragedy. Fiercely personal, and he has grown up at last to understand he cannot meddle for the wrong reasons.

She regards him evenly (rather, looks as though she does). "I am certain she is making every effort." I am valuable, after all. Trophy wife. Super ninja. Leaf princess.

_Blind Hyuuga._

Yes, indeed she must be (making every effort). Sometimes your best just isn't good enough.

"Um," he says, softly clumsy now, reaching deep. "If it's not – I mean if it's too painful for you then don't, but – but Gaara?"

"I killed him," she says with some measure of empty satisfaction. "It was the last thing I did, in Sand."

"Oh," slips out of his mouth, and he bites his tongue. Struggles with that, hard and long. He was my friend. I did not know him, but he was my friend. I saved your life and you're my comrade, and you killed him.

He should be grateful, should be hateful, should be forgiving. He isn't, isn't any of it. Will be, but for now he is numb. This is too far away, after too much.

She adds, contemplatively, like one measuring out a dept, "You did save my life." And for this reason she offers him the answers to the three mysteries, of which she is not ashamed though prefers not to speak. It is not for anyone else to understand; let them have what opinions they like, the truth is mine alone.

"Shukaku had devoured his soul." (one)

"He knew about Kankurou and I." (two)

"I lost my husband's child deliberately." (three)

She looks at him steadily, only she is not looking at all. "Please leave."

That meeting is with him now, several months later during an awkward family dinner, as Sakura-chan brings up her involvement in the preparations for the upcoming attempt at restoring Hanabi's eyesight. "We should be ready in another month or so," she says. "I believe there is a fair chance of success."

Sasuke raises a slim eyebrow, chin resting in his inky palm. His food has been finished or abandoned, a finger drumming absently against the stack of documents Sakura-chan forbade him from perusing during dinner; his hands have developed new calluses, rough patches of skin from where the pen rests, to compliment those which are legacies of weapons.

I can hardly work interesting missions, between ruling Sound and my detoriating chakra condition. I do it anyway, but I am aware it is not wise.

"Is there much of a point?" he asks bluntly. "She's fucked up in the head, the business with Neji proves it." Though the smirk shadowing his mouth is anything but disapproving.

"You're one to talk," Naruto mutters, rather affectionately.

Sakura-chan nobly ignores him, as does Itachi (save for his perpetual stare of numbing hatred). "She has an excellent mission record, I've heard she's getting better, and besides, she made amends for that, didn't she?"

Itachi, who has been very quiet, focused on Sasuke (which is not unusual per see, but this is the bad kind of quiet, red eyes locked on his parent in – anxiety), offers, "Neji-san was understandably upset, for a long time." It is easy to forget the boy (young man, now, or almost. older than sasuke was when he left) is the one closest to the Hyuuga. "I don't know if she had much of a choice; they're keeping her away from people."

"Of course they do," Sasuke mutters.

Naruto bursts out, "_Forcing_ her? They wouldn't!" The old fuckwits definitely, if they had any opportunity, what with their nauseating Branching traditions, but Neji and Hinata – redeemed hero Neji and sweet wonderful Hinata? Never, no way, not ever.

"They can't," Sasuke interjects, moodily. Naruto can't blame him for his sour temper, this time. Not with that big damn bruise discoloring most of the lower left half of his face. "This is Hyuuga Hanabi we're talking about. If you honestly think she wouldn't know to use the Branch Seal if she felt she had to, you're an idiot."

Hanabi was S-class, before she lost her sight.

She took Neji down carelessly, apologized carelessly. What did it matter? She is the Kazekage widow, the slayer of the Ichibi, the perfect Hyuuga specimen. She can do whatever the hell she pleases (it's just there isn't anything she wants).

"Of course," Itachi says, dismissively, politely. "Perhaps I should put Rina-chan to bed?"

"Please do," Sakura-san smiles, and the girl makes a face but complies readily enough, spell-bound by her brother complex. Itachi is the best and the worst older brother there has ever been.

In the children's absence Sakura-chan's expression grows sober, skeletal. "Sasuke," she says with a hollow kind of authority. "Please remove the clothing covering the injured areas."

He looks rather forbidding, tensing (you notice once you know him). "It's really not necessary for you to meddle, Sakura."

"Sasuke," Kakashi interjects mildly. "As long as you both give as good as you take it's not my business what you get up to in private, but getting healed can hardly hurt."

_If not_, the familiar pretend-surprised expression fills in with aging gleefulness that really should not still provoke or fool anyone, _that is actually what you like, going with the pain…_

"Fine," Sasuke snaps, slipping out of his shirt with a little less grace than one would normally have expected.

Yes, Naruto reflects, transfixed by the sight. Yes, there are reasons Itachi's hatred for him has reached new levels, why he wouldn't be surprised at an assassination attempt. Has been through two of them, as far as he's aware, though they were not very serious, healed by Kyuubi in a matter of seconds. Itachi must have known they would be, so they hardly count. Naruto can smile them away, grit his teeth and wonder if the boy will get serious. He hopes not, for everyone's sake, though maybe that's hypocritical.

They got along better, considerably better, just after he'd returned from Sand, but there are things you do not do to people's mothers, not if you want any possibility of forgiveness. Intellectually Itachi must know, everyone must know, that Naruto would not be uninjured were it not for Kyuubi but – it doesn't much help. Espiecally since probably neither one of them would be perpetually wounded were it not for the demon (sometimes he likes to think that, daydream another might-have-been. sometimes he hates the thought, chafing at the control it affords the nine tails over his present situation. i shape my life myself! …don't i?).

Itachi's hatred is understandable and complex, particularly if he has any inkling of what the sight now presented does to Naruto, that visage of Sasuke's torso deliberately marked up, reddish scratches and bruises from hands and teeth (claws and fangs, more like) – the sight should horrify him, with the blatant ownership etched in Dadaistic patterns across Sasuke's skin. Should provoke another promise of a lifetime – _I'll put a definite stop to this fucked-up shit, we'll work out our happy ending._

But really, it just turns him on.

Fuck you very much, Kyuubi. Except so many of the fox demon's instincts are Naruto's honest feelings, at this point.

It used to be so much about who was stronger, but that can't matter anymore, because no one is as powerful as the Fox Demon of the Nine Tails, and uncomplicated hatred for the Kyuubi is impossible because it would be too much like hating himself, and he's been hated enough, thanks.

They've experimented, seals, restraints, the Oiroke no Jutsu: Sasuke is not generally averse to a rough fight in bed, but there are – we established certain lines, once long ago when we were twelve. This far, and this far only, they can stretch them and live with each other, but cross the border and the bond will snap you dead. They cannot afford to cross these lines.

Kyuubi/Naruto is marginally gentler with a girl, which compensates to some degree for Sasuke being infuriatingly, panic-inducingly physically weaker in that form, and besides the fucking in itself is better; preparation, like lubrication, is an unfamiliar concept to the demon, and once again Sasuke doesn't mind, every now and then, but eventually it starts to be really painful and really humiliating to sit afterwards.

If he does the worst of it as a girl, his real body escapes the brunt of the damage and is mostly whole afterwards. The Mangekyou is the only thing that matters, and it remains untouched by the sex-switching.

"Anything else?" Sakura-chan asks.

Sasuke shakes his head impatiently.

She gives him a very level look. "Are you quite sure about that? I don't think any of us would like you to be the first man in history to bleed to death from the ass."

Sasuke glares in outrage and Naruto bites back – something, a laugh or a sob or anything in between. "I took care of it," Sasuke says shortly. "And keep your voice down." _Itachi does not need to hear that._

Rina even less.

"Naruto," Sakura-chan says in the sterile voice she uses with patients, so kindly authoritative, it's for your own good… "If this is how bad it's gotten, I'd like you to stay away from my daughter. I'm sorry, but I have to put her best interests first. She can't defend herself, at all. If you slipped just a little it'd be too late."

"I would never hurt Rina-chan!" The words are thick, reflexive, ardent desperation.

"Perhaps not," Sakura-chan says tightly. "But you wouldn't need to, in the stricter sense. She isn't Itachi. She doesn't need to see the ugly side of adulthood yet."

"I agree," Sasuke says unexpectedly.

Of course he does. Any self-respecting, responsible adult who truly cares about their child would.

"I see," says Naruto, in a strange thin voice bearing little resemblance to his normal tones. "Yeah. I guess it's better that way."

No it isn't, how can it be, she's my baby, I love her!

Only Kyuubi's not losing their internal battles anymore, and yes, I do love her.

"When you get better," Sakura-chan starts.

"Sure," Naruto interrupts sharply. "Of course."

Because we know. Team Seven, always and forever, in the beginning and the end, and yes, that end is drawing ever and rapidly closer.

Because he knows that under the necessary surface layer of forced faith in the happy endings they've long since lost touch with, she is dreadfully certain he will not be getting better.

He's going to prove her wrong of course, but it still hurts, and since Kyuubi awakened Naruto has learned of fear, and of desperation.

They do not speak of that. It is easier to trade trite remarks about the Hyuuga, the Kazekage widow.

("i can't get over how gaara knew she had an affair with his brother," naruto muttered at one point, home from his brief audience with the leaf princess and distraught.

sasuke raised a haughty brow, looking up only momentarily from his eternal stacks of paperwork. "you knew about me and kakashi. he hadn't even married her because he wanted to.")

Her alleged affair with Kankurou is a popular subject, hushed whispers in the streets, although few would seriously believe it.

"It has to have been more complicated than that," Sakura-chan says. "I mean – he was a eunuch. It could hardly have been about sex, or looks for that matter." He was maimed in more ways than one, but the one person in the family not to be stunted emotionally. Amazingly, what a man, after all, to be whole and loving after the Ichibi and the civil war.

They all remember Konohamaru declaring, _Shit, if she preferred his castrate brother, Gaara must've brought an entirely new level of bad to being bedded._

Sasuke, who is not entirely unamused by the notion, looks suddenly thoughtful, surprising everyone present by deigning to partake in the conversation: "Is she actually barren?"

"No?" Sakura-chan replies. Elaborates, obviously confused as though why Sasuke is still directing that introvert but undeniably interested gaze at her. "The miscarriage didn't leave any permanent damage. If she just gained a bit of weight I reckon it'd be fine."

"Huh," Sasuke says, in a slow considering tone of voice.

Across the table Kakashi blinks, clearly seeing where this is going and clearly amused, in a rather bitter way.

Naruto and Sakura look at them, Sasuke and Kakashi, Kakashi and Sasuke, and speak simultaneously.

"Why is this of any interest to you?"

"I swear to god, if you cheat on me with Hyuuga Hanabi I will kill someone."

"No reason," Sasuke says, exercising his mystical expertise in blending scornful and smug tones into entirely new levels of condescending.

Green and blue eyes snap immediately to their old instructor, who smiles blithely and raises his hands in mock defense. "Don't look at me," he says, in the light tone that announces they won't get anything out of him until he's good and ready. Likely long after Sasuke's caved, in other words.

Easier to talk about others, yes, but easy can only carry you so far.

"I'll go say goodnight to Rina-chan," Naruto mutters, trying not to sound rebellious. He's not going to ask permission.

Sakura-chan nods softly, Kakashi politely ignores him.

In the familiar pastel bedroom Itachi levels a red glare at him, seated on the floor close to the headboard with a book open across his knees.

"Get out," Naruto tells him. Itachi studies him briefly, so very much like Sasuke sixteen years ago – passive-aggressive and brim-full of issues he won't let anyone touch. It's just Naruto knows Sasuke, in a way he doesn't think Itachi will ever allow himself to be known, to Naruto.

Rather unlike Sasuke at his age the kid doesn't argue with the command, just shrugs and gets up and out.

(it is a chilling thing, when he remembers it, that physically he is more contemporary with sasuke's son than with sasuke)

Rina-chan looks up at him sleepily as he takes Itachi's place and kneels over her, eyes aching over his smile. She doesn't need to see them red.

"Daddy?" she mumbles. Eight years old, soft and trusting and the most miraculous thing in the history of the world. His daughter, our girl.

"Yeah, baby girl," he mutters, holding her carefully, carefully cradled close, so she won't notice the desperation that always laces last touches. He smoothes a curly lock of hair behind her ear, breathes in his crazy love. Knows he shouldn't speak, she isn't stupid and will draw conclusions, but there is no time and some things are more important than propriety. So he whispers only a little huskily, confides that she's his best girl, always will be, I love you, you must know that, I love you so very much, you're brilliant and you're going to have a brilliant life, and did I mention I love you, my baby?

xxxxx

It is a very normal day. She has fairly recently returned from a minor mission, is jogging home after a light bout of sparring with Rock Lee.

The sunlight feels weak on skin used to the desert heat; she wishes she could take a different trek but is tired, mainly from listlessness, her chakra sensitivity clumsy and muted.

She hasn't seen a thing after the image of her dead husband and brother-in-law was lost to her. Remembers walking through the musty, dusky corridors, feeling her way forward with chakra and bleeding hands on the walls, walking past fighting, dying, wailing men she did not stop for. Did not stop at all, until she had reached the familiar storage room, stumbled into the old comfort of tree, robes, paint and poison. She crawled into the largest of Kankurou's remaining puppets, hid there until the ANBU men found her and took her away. She did not protest, did not aid them.

The blackness was a relief, then. It isn't anymore.

Hasn't been for a long time. She is angry, scared, lost inside this suddenly substandard body.

_I could see sound._

(i could see you)

Frustrated, chilled, she nevertheless notices the rather impressive concentration of chakra speeding towards her. The line of her mouth grows harder – she's not moving out of the way. People move for her, always have, like they ought to. So she keeps going, too angry to stop, to even shift minutely to the side so they may pass each other smoothly.

Except (and she does realize this, cocks a mental eyebrow in challenge) the other person isn't giving an inch of ground either.

Which means they collide harshly, not a full speed but not exactly slowly either, tumble gracefully. She lands crouched, turns back towards the man out of habit, gallingly aware it will not do her any good (the hokage said, _soon. _next week, probably. with a seventy-three percent chance of success).

Itachi is standing up as well, cursing fate. He should have known Murphy had it in for him.

Hyuuga Hanabi, indeed. He's heard so much, seen so little. Will likely see quite a lot more, in the very immediate future.

He should probably say something. It's difficult; he can't sort out how he feels about this development.

"Uchiha." Her tone is low and not uninviting, the voice itself scratchy-hoarse; betraying damaged vocal chords.

Forcing a reply is easier than expected. "Yeah," he says. "It's interesting to meet you." A pleasure? Oh, no. Nice? Couldn't say. But interesting? Yes, definitely.

"You're the son," she concludes.

"I'm Uchiha Itachi." Not a_ child_, not for along time.

She shrugs, lightly. "Sasuke's heir, then. The one Neji mentioned."

A little pleased, he offers, cautiously, "You're a popular topic. I've heard more than mentions." Aggravation grows again. "I'd like to fight you, if you don't mind."

"I don't mind."

They do it by a stream, at one of the less frequented training sites. Master of the Mangekyou Sharingan and its genjutsu that he is, Itachi is certainly hampered as well by her blindness. Were he not used to the Hyuuga and their Bloodline Limit he would not have noticed, but the way she tilts her head is different; for sound, not for sight.

Careful both, and clever in nasty calculating ways, neither one ever quite stops holding back.

It's not bad, all the same. Rather brilliant, in fact.

Afterwards she wades into the stream, her movements tentative for the first time, like a blind person might properly act. It must be courtesy of the desert, he decides, watching her return to land and sit down beside him, legs stretched long and maimed in front of her, body resting on her elbows. Wet and clinging her clothes obscure little, of the ruined legs or the many scars or the painful thinness. He – doesn't feel quite comfortable, keeping silent (which is a first, and attempts though fails to throw him). I could rather not-dislike her, he thinks.

Into the stillness, contemplative and a smudge distraught though obscuring that last as best as he's able (particularly from himself), he admits, musingly, just a little bit a challenge, "I'm supposed to marry you."

She does not bother turning her face towards him, lies very still, offering a sharp profile. "Why?"

Uncomfortable suddenly he stalls for time, desperate to prove it is not his innovation, "He asked if you could still have children." Offers this rather definitely like a challenge, which wasn't the point, but it's too late now.

And to his complete surprise she throws back her head and laughs, a wild bright sound. "Did he, now. Please correct me if I am at fault for presupposing the person in question is your parent."

He says nothing. Has too much to say for any of it to make it through.

"Well," she says eventually, shifting to face him after all, out of habit. "Aren't you terribly young?"

Abruptly he recalls she took the Chuunin Exam with Team Seven, the year he was born. "I'll be fourteen in three months." Then again he went through that particular ordeal at age five.

What is there to lose? Her friends are gone, her husband and her presumed soul mate and her genius gift. She's been married politically before.

Once you think about it, it is so dauntingly obvious. The Leaf princess with the perfect genes, heiress of nothing, to the next Uchiha Head. He'll inherit Sound, she will likely be named a candidate for the position of Sixth Hokage, if she recovers. A match made in heaven – from which the Bloodline Limits allegedly hail, Byakugan and Sharingan, compatible, one sprung from the other, the red eyes dominant when breeding.

Redhead Jinchuuriki, talks to sand – that was the description she had been given, the one she agreed to, setting out to be wed in the desert.

What little she knows of Itachi she cannot fault – Uchiha prodigy, skilled and precocious, reportedly quiet and able to compromise. And it's hard to wrestle praise from Neji.

"My eye surgery will hopefully take place soon. Then we'll see."

He misunderstands deliberately, muttering, "I'm told I look much like my parents."

_I had a crush on your mother, when I was a little younger than you are now_ ('you and me both,' he doesn't reply to the question she doesn't ask). On the other hand, healthy relationships are unheard of among ninja. If they worked you'd think someone would have caught a rumor of it.

He has long been aware that both family duty and domestic peace demand he sire heirs, the more the better, and if he has to – well, Hyuuga Hanabi is not the worst alternative there could've been. Jounin on the quiet side, and her movements are spectacular. They could teach him to consider her beautiful, he thinks. If he squints.

He likes her family, at least.

Tries to phrase a polite question to encompass the many necessary inquiries, the sudden curiosity laced with an absent sort of care: the Akatsuki Incident, the marriage in the desert, the end of Sand and what happened before it. He doubts he succeeds, but apparently it is a less sensitive subject than he had imagined, all of it.

"Sometimes," she says in a soft firm voice, "I feel it was all a dream." Something that isn't a smile twists her lips. "Other times I feel I am slipping into sleep now, by being here."

Standing up, she offers a hand. Taking it, feeling the large knuckles and the rough skin over very frail bones, he stares at her feet. One of her pants legs has ridden up a tad, exposing more of the metal rod. His hip aches rather badly from the earlier connection.

Thirteen isn't a child, she remembers that. And he's fairly good company, in his moody quiet way.

"My love was for my husband's brother," she says. There is stillness, is alright to speak it: Kankurou taught her she was capable of loving after all, and no one can touch that. Not even she, anymore. "I won't care if you cheat."

The gift Gaara offered her, a simple and far from insignificant one.

"I wasn't planning to."

She shrugs.

They part as friends, in an odd way. As engaged, in matters of the heart and of the practical mind.

xxxxxxxxxx


	54. Deeper than Love

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 54:**

"**Deeper than Love"**

The study is large and old-ish, smelling of expensive ink and of materials brought back from the brink of forever. For someone as young as he, admittedly, a length of time does not have to span many generations to be considered forever.

A ninja is required to fight with his body; an heir must also know how to fight with his mind. At thirteen, thusly, Hyuuga Noh is rather too well acquainted with his father's study.

Minako laughs at his odd complaints, in that annoying younger-sister way she has. She's only nine and still catching up mentally, but it is unpleasantly clear to him that she will soon overtake him intellectually. At least Mamoru only dabbles in baby-speech.

So Minako doesn't understand his troubles because she thinks social intrigue is entertaining and she has a way with words to sway the Elders (he grimaces at the thought; they have never been happy with the changes enforced by his parents, and after the spectacle with aunt hanabi using the seal on father, and the consequences of this, they are livid) and Itachi, his supposed best friend, just gives him that bemused, uncanny look: obviously it isn't just that he cannot understand the problem, but that he cannot see why there would be one. There are of course no elders in the Uchiha Clan, but there is a Sound Council – shouldn't that amount to basically the same thing?

"The Hyuuga Elders," his mother explained, "believe that it is their occupation to make decisions, and the Clan Head's business to carry out these decisions of theirs. Uchiha-san's associates have been made well aware that it is for him to make decisions and for them to abide by them."

Then why don't you and Father do the same thing?

She looked at him for a very long time, a weighty sad stare. "I do not believe in forcing my opinions on anyone," she said. "If others go along with me only because of fear, the result will be hatred, whatever my original intention. I have had enough of hatred. I want to carry us all through together. That demands cooperation, mutual respect and understanding."

He wonders abruptly which mode of leadership Hanabi-san employed, when she was the Kazekage's wife in Sand.

Immediately he curses himself for a fool: either you agree with her or your intelligence levels must be so below human that your opinions are not worth considering, that much has been made unpleasantly clear to him.

There is a sharp, decisive rapping on the door.

"Yes," Father calls, and in walks the illustrious lady he just entertained thoughts of. Although, lady? Hah.

Noh attempted to walk around with his eyes closed, once or twice, after watching her. The results were rather humiliating and slightly painful.

"I assume there is something you wish to discuss with me," Father says softly. "Good or bad news?"

"I believe they will please you," she replies. Noh shrinks back: she looks dangerous and strange, despite the fresh bruise blooming over her collarbone, visible above the neckline of her top. Mother must be choosing her clothes again, there is no other reason she would be wearing color.

"You may stay, then, Noh," Father decides, and Noh sinks back down.

He studies her intently, though with his Byakugan politely deactivated. Not the slightest trace of expression alters her features as she says, "Uchiha Itachi has made me an offer of marriage"

"What?" Noh squeaks.

They both ignore him completely.

"The date for your eye surgery has been finalized," Father says in a strictly composed voice, speaking with obvious care. "I was told that it will take place on the day of the new moon."

"I don't imagine the outcome will affect his proposal," Hanabi says dryly with the damaged rusty voice that chases chills up Noh's spine every time he hears it.

"His proposal," Father repeats, again with great carefulness and possible a smudge of stress placed on the first word.

"Obviously it was not his idea," Aunt Hanabi replies. "He's going along with it nicely, however."

"The liaison would of course be a great achievement and profit for both clans," Father says, absolutely expressionless, like the outcome of this conversation does not affect him in the slightest. "For the village at large, even."

"I assume you must be aware," she says, in a strange soft voice, "of how much I despised you and my sister for allowing Father to dictate your lives. But I told him yes."

Neji should nod, calmly. He says, with more intensity and more resignation than he ought rightly to allow himself, "You don't have to."

"I know that," she says, mildly, for being her. "I honestly do not mind."

"You may leave," Father tells Noh, immediately after Hanabi-san has departed. "Go to your mother. I shall hold council with the Elders."

"Will they…?"

"They will be overjoyed," Father assures him dryly before he softens. "Goodnight, Noh."

_Overjoyed_, his father said. His mother just looks sad though.

"Mother?" he tries softly. "Isn't this supposed to be a really positive development?"

"In its way," she replies. "It will yield beneficial results, I believe. But I so worry about the moral of the story. Peace and prosperity shouldn't have to be requirements for making allowances for love. I don't – I can't believe the end always justifies the means, and this is setting a disturbing trend."

"She said she didn't mind," Noh argues quietly, attempting to cheer her up.

Mother's smile is very sad, however. "I believe her," she says, "and perhaps that is the saddest part of all." She reaches out to ruffle his hair. "Itachi-kun is your age, you know. Not that he hasn't always been too old for his years, but…"

Technically yes, they were born only months apart, though this fact is disturbingly easy to forget. Which provides very good reason for Noh to demand, on the next occasion Itachi takes him and Minako training: "Are you _out of your mind_?"

"No," Itachi says mildly and kicks him in the chin. "The clan must continue." He shrugs. "She's – interesting."

"Are you saying you're – in love with her or something?"

"Of course not. But I can't have what I want anyway. Block faster, is this all your eyes are good for?"

They speak no more of it.

xxxxx

On the day of the new moon Tsunade places her hands around Hyuuga Hanabi's head, with an awareness that something will come to an end through this gesture.

"I hear Sasuke and Neji are in agreement for once," she remarks.

"So am I, in the matter to which I presume you are alluding," the strange young woman replies primly.

A long interval during which talking would not be an option.

Then, "Children will be expected."

"Naturally. They will arrive."

"I see. Good. Open your eyes."

The room is large and glaringly, blindingly white. Attendants mill through it like ants, muting lights, drawing draperies tight over the windows, offering refreshments to their master.

Sight burns through the brightness; her smile is so small you could get lost in her face searching for it, but the Leaf princess is the sort of person who renders everything else inconsequential through the force of her presence; the expression is noticed and noted. Tsunade remembers what it was like, to have a smile that could light a room. It has little to do with charisma, or moral or intelligence or even beauty: it is power, pure and simple, bleeding over from the ninjutsu to the person wielding it.

"Byakugan," Hanabi says, in a voice so impassionate it comes out toneless. Gasps, tears streaming down her suddenly-wrinkly face, as the sensory overload hits her long-dormant sight center.

"I am sure there will be a good time for those children," Tsunade says. _I feel my age today_. "However, I would suggest having them only when your workload changes, after I have named you my successor."

I might not understand the last thing about her, but it will have to be her.

In time. One day when Tsunade is ready to drop the mask, able to move on from the Ninja War of her adolescence.

She will walk out of the village a gray old lady, unrecognizable, never seen, achingly new, her body broken with age. Out and away she will walk, on the legs that ran so often to her father, walked beside her mother, teased her younger brother's by being stronger, faster; that kicked Jiraiya, brushed against Orochimaru, wrapped around Dan. On the far end of memory lane they will belong to her only, and she will walk on them until they give out, far away where the land ends. She plans to sit there for a while, in one of the high places of the world where the sun reaches first and the wind is hard, before she continues on, walking off the edge, into the sea.

Hanabi's reawakened eyes see nothing of this. They do see through the illusion, if she squints the right way, but that is needless rudeness.

"You may leave," the Hokage announces. There are lectures she could give, political innuendoes to be implied, instructions to be given, but she is caught up, just now, in the past. Hanabi is not stupid, will not overstrain her new sight.

"Hokage-sama." Even when she was a child, innocent and earnest, there was something in her genius quality that made deference seem a scam, made her obedience humiliating for the one towards whom it was directed.

Nevertheless, the old Leaf Queen has reason to be pleased with their warrior baby. Hanabi is loved the way royalty are, sweet broken celebrity, childlike killing machine.

Perhaps Itachi is even besotted.

Not likely: nobility are after breeding partners, not sweethearts. Marrying for love is out of fashion.

There is some irony to be found in that thought, an easing: Uchiha Sasuke, the personification of the perfect Uchiha, tied to humanity by a single red thread. Or rather an orange one, as the case might be.

She takes a second to wonder, briefly, whether Sakura will allow him to marry off Rina. Doubts it, but the girl is kind and easily manipulated. Should she manifest the Sharingan, Tsunade does not doubt that Sasuke will make sure she knows to whom she belongs. It makes her feel a little ill, but it will be – not best in the long run, perhaps, but necessary.

Another second stolen from reality, as she remembers being that young. Sarutobi-sensei smiling at them, distant sunlight on her neck, Jiraiya's grin and Orochimaru's smirk constituting known and grudgingly loved realities on either side of her.

I never had a problem being a girl, but well, things are different now. Supposedly it's a good thing Hyuuga Hanabi and Uchiha Itachi are willing to close their eyes and think of Leaf.

Or perhaps that's not quite what they will be thinking of, but that's a train of thought only Jiraiya has tickets to.

In either case the engagement is made public, the two lovebirds exchanging the compulsory public cheek-kisses, working an S-rank together and introducing families.

Itachi is well known to all Hyuuga, of course, and much liked. Only Hinata remains a touch sad, for him as much as for her sister, though musters a smile and a kind touch to his shoulder; he is very short.

Sasuke, who matters most, offers approval; a misshapen smile, a grudging nod. Hanabi returns the gesture, used to socially inept prodigies (seeing one in the mirror, when i bother looking). Naruto, Sakura and Rina are all understandably confused, less than happy with the idea of arranged marriage and looking for sweeter excuses: well, it's good Itachi has someone, and Hanabi could use company, they're both very unique snowflakes, and snowflakes are pretty… Um, yeah, or something.

Kakashi offers a leer and a crinkled eye and everything is forgiven. Perverted old man with a dirty past and a genius rep, who could resist? Certainly not Hanabi, so alike, smiling back. I can see why you like him, Itachi-san.

As a matter of fact the entire village is grotesquely pleased, aflame with hysterical happiness at the news: the Leaf princess and the Uchiha prodigy, what could be a better promise of a positive future?

They could all use some good news, something to distract from grim reality. Tsunade is forcibly reminded of this when Uchiha Itachi bursts into her office after an abrupt scuffle outside, as wild-eyed as emotionally fucked-up antisocial killer prodigies are wont to get.

"Come quick," he says in something that goes past prayer and order, comes out a bark, so scared, so hurt, kicked little puppy. "I don't think there's any coming back from this one."

Privacy is good, and if she can't do this no one can; and she is nodding sharply and standing up, marches after him outside before they take flight. That is what it feels like, for a brief moment laced with the tactile awareness of being a girl, life sharp on her tongue, spiced with desperation, body stretching to its limits to keep up with her mind.

I am growing old.

Idiot hag. You have been old for years. You lost your youth when you lost your love, all of your loves.

Itachi scales the vertical wall with inhuman speed, the dexterity of a monkey and red chakra leaking from his feet. She does not hesitate in following, her shoes leaving imprints in the wall. Then they are climbing in through a window, and dear lord, no this does not look good at all.

She has seen some spectacularly sick shit in her days. Orochimaru has been responsible for much of it.

None of that can make this day any less bad.

The apartment is blown apart, the entire floor has become a war zone; the above level of the building has partially caved in, mimicked by this one. Looking down through the gaps she sees devastation, hears cries. Dying civilians, no doubt there are a lot of them. What catches her attention is the redness in one corner, what was once Naruto but is now a bundle of furious chakra. His eyes are crimson, his canines and claws pronounced; his stance feral like the outline of tail and fox ears, the whisker scars glowing, open down to the bones of his cheeks. Their appearance seems to go unnoticed by him; his glance is blank, pupils rolled up into hiding, shaking hands raging against some kind of restriction.

"This way," Itachi demands, tugging at her arm, pulling her in another direction.

And there is the origin of that restriction.

You've caused much of the spectacularly sick shit I've seen in my days, which makes it a little easier but still very bad to see you like this.

On trained professional healer's feet she makes her way to him, gathering chakra to flexible, concentrated hands. Her mind is roaring, her heart thudding, and no, it isn't Sasuke she sees, isn't Uchiha she bends over in her mind's perception of current reality.

His chakra is so overstrained it is actively destroying his cells, lending unnecessary aid to the damage Kyuubi must have dealt him. Or was it Naruto? It's hard to tell, these days.

It is one of the more complicated procedures she has been through, but mostly because of the primitive circumstances, the stress; the injures are grave and horrendous, yes, but very straightforward, and chakra strain is one of her specialties. It'd have to be, given some of her own techniques.

Finally he glances up at her, lying coughing on a solid part of the floor. ANBU have flooded the scene; a handful of them stand useless guard around Naruto, the few who can heal are crouching in hers and Sasuke's vicinity with Itachi. Most of them are helping the civilians.

"I'm taking you to the hospital," she tells him in the voice that brooks no arguments, not even from him (or he's just exhausted, numb, aware she is right; which is worse). "Can we move Naruto?"

He gags hard on speech but does not actually throw up, clutching painfully at his stomach, perspiration running down his white face. "He's moving now?"

"Yes," she snaps. _Why are you scared? You can't be scared!_

Cough, a sound like pain itself sliding around inside his chest. "I hit him with two Tsukiyomi."

Oh fuck. Oh merciful god, it is over. There is no grace left, not a scrape of it, once you are fallen there comes a point where you cannot get up, and it is over, it is over, it is the end.

"Itachi," she says, gentle, velvet over steel that cuts. "Have you ever used that one? But you know how? Good. Do it."

He walks to the front of the cluster around Naruto, over the broken floor, not hearing the civilian moans over the ragged wet sound of Sasuke's breathing, not seeing the destruction over the image of Sasuke being – miserable.

The red thing, the demon god, cuts a phantom line up his back through the mere presence of his chakra. Itachi is too angry and spiteful to let himself be intimidated.

"Move," he tells the closest ANBU, and fixes his Mangekyou eyes on the blind ones that might still, in some sense, be Naruto's. Might not. He must say, _Tsukiyomi_, four times before the beast slumps. He can feel the marks of his irises spinning in overtired frenzy, feels his body shake, but is distant from it.

"Take him," Tsunade orders curtly. "Put him in the restricted hospital ward. Get Jiraiya to guard him, in addition to five regular squads. Shizune, oversee them moving Uchiha."

It is not the first time Itachi has seen Sasuke with bite-marks on his face, bruises all down his front, claw-cuts crisscrossing his back or chakra burning under his skin. It is the first time he has seen him unconscious from it.

He sits at the bedside, keeping watch, keeping guard, even though his eyes see nothing but fluctuating redness.

Sakura-san comes in during the evening, sitting down beside him. It is the firs time, as well, that he has been grateful for her presence. He'd have liked Kakashi-sensei, or, he thinks, Hanabi-san or Rina-chan, but the first two are away on work and his sister should be spared this, spared anything she can. Spiteful, like he's never been before, not to her, too tired to stop himself, he consider it unfair, wants to spit that it's not alright, I was never saved from anything.

That could've been alright, if he had been spared this one terrible ordeal. Because this – this, and he knows it, knows it even before Tsunade-sama comes and speaks, _this is not reversible_.

"I'm sorry," the Hokage says, for the first time. "I've done all I can. We will have to use the Final Sealing."

It is explained, in the red hollow silence, with the new terrible soft voice Tsunade-sama has never had before, that preparations for this have been undertaken, since the first time Naruto really hurt someone after his return from Sand. Since the day when Itachi stumbled home to find Sasuke's blood in the kitchen sink.

This is the master technique the Fourth utilized; it will demand a sacrifice of blood and love, and it will bind the Kyuubi comprehensively into Naruto's body. There is no way, she says, no way in heaven or in hell that Naruto's soul will survive another complete invasion of the demon power. He will be sealed, and it will kill him.

It'll be a martyr's death, though; so fully immersed in Naruto's body, the Kyuubi too will be forced from reality when its shell ceases to live (naruto the person will be dead, and the nine tail's chakra shall have to be sealed so that the body dies before it can be healed). The demon will be banished to the Higher Contemporary Plan of Existence, the one the summons inhabit when they are not called into human service.

The mortal world will be safe, for hundreds of years.

We have already, Tsunade-sama says in the tired listless way of someone who has failed, marked a hundred people with the Martyr Seal; their life force will be drained in sacrifice. Mostly the chosen ones are elders, the chronically sick; the terminally ill, convicted criminals. But it is life-force that is needed, and expensive brands of blood: a dozen Hyuuga, more, are on the list, and quite a lot of Sound ninja ordered to comply; be a patriot or face the consequences.

"If," she finishes, "if Uchiha Sasuke acts as the Martyr Executioner, as there is reason to believe he will, the Mangekyou Sharingan will be added to the total amount of sacrificial blood, and no further casualties will be necessary."

"He'll die, then," Itachi says in a numb voice.

It is Sakura-san who gives the teary affirmative.

"Jiraiya could," Tsunade-sama adds. "He could do it. It would be possible."

Itachi nods; but it is a listless movement.

Sasuke and Naruto; Naruto and Sasuke, and no one else can ever be part of that. It will be between the two of them, always.

Sasuke sleeps for four days, chakra and strength restoring themselves; after another Tsukiyomi, Naruto too remains peaceful.

Hanabi-san comes by and holds his hand, with more solemnity and honest grief than he had expected. Kakashi-sensei stands silent, bony fingers on his shoulders, warm arms around him, saddened beyond any expression or any kind of dealing. Sakura-san's eyes are wet but she does not cry.

She tells him stories to comfort herself, esoteric theories like litanies: there are no endings, the universe is a circle, and circles have no ends, no ending, always and forever they move on.

You see, people think – there isn't just this world. There are different planes of possibility, there are places where all our might-have-beens are realized. Bodies die but souls don't, you know. They are caged in new flesh, in new places, to fix their lives, to try for their should-have-beens anew, with the people and the circumstances they cannot leave behind.

He shouldn't believe her, but it's nice to hear.

When eventually the end commences (end of my world), it is remarkably dingy and simple. There is nothing great or glorious about it, just a tired finality.

Sasuke sits up and in bed and they decide very calmly that it is for the best that Rina be spared this as well, let's leave our baby girl with happy memories of her fathers. Hug Sakura; I love you. Hug Kakashi; I love you.

Hold Itachi, long and tight; you most of all, always you, so much love. Live as happy as you can.

Naruto is released from the Tsukiyomi but heavily restrained and drugged; more aware than he has been since he snapped, but glowing orange still.

It is the old dilemma, the heroic ultimatum: _if you love this world, give up your life in it_.

He doesn't, anymore, neither one of them loves it. There are people, though. Always that, the precious people.

(and all the sick shit i have done, and how i've felt and not felt that i can live with it, and i couldn't even kill myself, and now – gallows humor, to the last, my love)

"Just tell them," he asks, soft wet eyes that aren't hesitant at all. "That I love them. Tell everyone, yeah? And I love you. Of course you, more than anything."

Goodbye then, family, precious ones, and it's really only the two of them. All that's needed.

Hand in hand they walk, far away until they reach a clearing. The mundane details have been taken care of; seals are painted, chakra brimmed, the Sacrificial Martyrs waiting.

Only the two of us.

All that's needed.

"I feel like it should be – flashier or something," Naruto says with a sheepish sound that was meant to be a laugh but didn't quite manage it, letting go of Sasuke to sit down in the center of the restraining blood-holy circle. "I… hey, you know."

"I know," Sasuke tells him.

And yeah, this is beyond words. Beyond this world, actually.

Went beyond love too a long time ago, never mind the articulations of it. What's love, just a four-letter word. We go brutally deeper than that.

Last touch, Naruto thinks fuzzily, but it doesn't seem real, none of it save the familiar hot pressure of Sasuke's presence really registers.

Then everything slips, he's falling away into redness and shadow, clings to awareness as best he can – will be enough sleep in the grave, right? Chakra surges high, but he's so far gone, retreating into his mind, Kyuubi forcing Its way to the forefront, so far gone he hardly feels it.

He simply watches, from this great distance, sees the beautiful day and the beautiful person pushing fingers into his own god-legacy eyes, pressing the dripping digits to Naruto, and there's brightness and red darkness, blurring, and there's – there's Sasuke.

Ha, ending, I cheated you. There wasn't an end at all. Just darkness, light, cascading pain and loss and love, and Sasuke.

Just this, just us.

xxxxxxxxxx


	55. Circle's End

**La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 55:**

"**Circle's End"**

He takes the brightly coloured paper box from his backpack, holding it balanced for a moment between spidery hands: long fingers, visible veins under very light skin; hell when the pimples attack. Bestowing a brief look around the Spartan room, he hides the package beneath his jumper and hurries through the hallway, locking himself in the bathroom where he draws a deep breath.

His eyes in the mirror remain steady and chill as he shrugs out of the dark hoodie and the school uniform shirt underneath, opening the box and skimming over the preparations before starting to apply the dye to his hair. Afterwards he sits on the toilet seat, reading and waiting, the fan turned on as high as it can go to obscure the thick, sharp smell of the product.

Half an hour later he rinses it out, stares mutely at his own reflection. His hair is an entirely unremarkable light brown, with only the odd millimetre of silver-blond left. He nods to himself, mouth quirking, and pulls his previously discarded clothes on again.

Back in his room he shoulders the backpack and puts on a pair of fingerless gloves that obscure the nasty streaks of long-since melted skin that slither over the backs of both his hands. He bends over the CD player, letting music spill into the room, loud enough to sound softly through most of the house, before he opens a window and climbs out.

The veranda roof is slippery under his feet, a too-fast treacherous descent, but he manages to grab hold, fitting fingers and sneakers into the wedges between the planks, and eventually makes it down, jumping the last bit and landing crouched on the lawn.

He hurries away immediately, before one to the servants looks out, climbing again, over the wall this time, which is easy from the inside. The drop to the pavement is higher, the impact shudders through his knees, but he walks it off fast, following the accumulating mass of people down into the dark pulsating heart of the underground.

Many stations later he buys train tickets cash and sits down in a compartment, hugging his backpack and resting his face against the cold glass of the window.

Mum told him to count stars, wish upon them, but they are not visible in the dark, dirty sky. Just as well; it wouldn't do to disappoint himself with a failed childish hope.

Father always said the star business was rubbish, which makes him want to try, but ultimately it is useless. If you want something done, you'd better do it yourself. Don't trust the sodding stars, of all things. They're just there, pointless and vaguely nice.

He ignores the other travellers and falls into an uneasy sleep.

I just couldn't take it anymore.

Hours, days, later he's sitting on a park bench in the early afternoon, tired and miserable. The eternal grey rain is a soft mist in the air, and the phantom ache of old hurts isn't fiery enough to keep him warm.

Grow up, he tells himself. No one's going to rescue you. No one would ever even believe you when you needed help, remember that.

So he gets up. He needs warmth, shelter, food. He needs a job.

Anyplace will do, really; he enters the first establishment he sees, some kind of fast-food place.

And it's – warm, at least, and rather deserted. He supposes it's not a good time, between lunch and dinner. Bad pop songs blare from the loudspeakers, and sharp smells of cheap food that would normally disgust him are thick in the air.

Making his way through slowly, letting heat return to his sodden body, he leans over the counter. "Excuse me."

The response comes in the form of a sharp-boned body colliding with his.

"The hell," he mutters, pushing back and ending up face to face with a truly absurd boy of maybe fifteen, bedecked in what could most flatteringly be described as a …unique… punk ensemble.

And I am clumsy, frozen, feeling like the world's just taken a step in the wrong direction; wiping ketchup off his front, glaring icy death at the offender.

"Shit, sorry," the employee – Rick, according to his badge – offers. "But you were totally in the way."

"Excuse me," Adrian repeats, much less politely this time. "You're the one who stumbled, you sod. I was just standing here."

"What's going – Rick!" a new voice interjects; Adrian looks up to see an adult stepping out from what is presumably the kitchen. Disapproval fairly radiates off the man as he takes in the dark spots on the expensive hoodie. "I'm very sorry, Rick's such a clumsy object, of course we take full responsibility…"

"Excellent," says Adrian. "I'm looking for a job."

Surprise, acquiescence. Rick's told to show him around, get it over with now and you can start tomorrow, we just lost a girl...

Rick grabs his wrist as fast as the manager's gone, a warm hard grip, crumpling the material. It feels very strange.

"Let go," Adrian mutters, but not before they are behind the counter. The till is simple to handle, so's the system for finding whatever food the customers might order.

"Adrian," he says when Rick asks for his name. "Adrian Smith."

It'd be too stupid to use his real surname, but he's not a liar. No one's going to believe in this pseudonym for a second.

"Rick Thompson." The handshake is rough, bone-crushing. An obvious challenge, but afterwards Rick just blabbers on, friendly enough between the insults. Adrian doesn't reply in kind, doesn't want or need friends, but he's not just going to stand there and take being insulted, is he?

"Git," he mutters, pleased to see Rick's no doubt childish retort interrupted by a customer.

The purchase is smooth. Of course, working a fast-food joint isn't supposed to be complicated.

What is, even though it shouldn't be, is Rick abandoning the argument and turning on him in earnest afterwards.

I don't want to talk to you, Adrian thinks, but then, he can hardly leave.

"So what compels a rich kid like you to look for a job? Trying to investigate the lowly masses? Yeah well, guess what, I'm not gonna stay like this."

Jesus, and he's stuck working with a retard. A retard with an inferiority complex the size of London, from the sounds of it.

"I don't care," he says shortly. "I ran away from home."

"Huh," says Rick, tone wavering between curiosity and concern. No pity, thank god, because if there had been Adrian would've hit him. "Too bad. Your parents mental or something?"

No one would ever believe it. Those who know who Adrian is wouldn't because they also know his father; those who will read about it, when the press gets hold of the story, well they'd never believe Adrian Peters could be found here.

"It's my father," he says. Can't speak further, couldn't even if he wanted to, which he very emphatically doesn't.

"Sorry," Rick says, and actually sounds like he knows what he's saying and means it. That's a first.

Also more of a relief than it should be.

"Anyway," Adrian snaps. "What's up with you?"

When hesitation passes over the other's face he gives a pointed stare at the pink hair, clarifying his point: you can keep your shit to yourself, I really do not care.

"Ah," says Rick, grinning now, broadly and brightly. "It was a bet, kind of. My old landlord's daughter said she'd talk to Daddy about my late rent if I did it. But, eh, I got chucked out anyway." He is silent for a long moment, pale green eyes suddenly intent and a little suspicious on Adrian's face. "Hey, um. Are you on drugs?"

"No."

Good, thinks Rick, that's one hurdle cleared. "Convicted for anything?"

"No."

Sweet, this is just getting better. "D'you have money?"

"Yes of course," Adrian snaps. "I'm working here because I'm so damn well off. What do you think, you stupid prat?"

"_You_'re stupid, bastard!" He checks himself, takes another fast look at the grumpy face and chill eyes. Takes the plunge. "Do you have anywhere to live?"

"…No."

"Good," he breathes briskly. "That makes you my new roommate."

And Adrian doesn't want to sleep outside again, so when the shift is over he lets Rick bring him to the shoddy one-room flat he calls home. Adrian's home too, now, because he doesn't have anything else.

It's small and dingy and horrible. He feels safer than he has for quite some time.

"Put your stuff here," Rick says, studying his companion, the thick jumper, the jerky movement as Adrian frees himself from the backpack. Probably around his own age, and quiet, and with something about him that just _itches_, be it the arrogance or the half-hidden tragedy. No silence has ever spoken as loudly as Adrian's, with that level grey stare.

Rick would definitely not have offered to share with the guy if he had any choice in the matter, but quite frankly he can't afford the rent on his own and he's not eager to lose the place. 'Sides, company is company, and can be good. Maybe.

They have toast for dinner in the ratty kitchen. Adrian is silent still and a very tidy eater, sitting cross-legged on the chair and wiping crumbs from his mouth; Rick has turned his chair around and is leaning his arms on its back, stuffing his face and talking about everything and nothing, gesturing brightly. There's someone who's willing to listen, now. For the first time in a very long while.

"I'm tired," Adrian says rather flatly afterwards, when the food's eaten and the table swept clean, and retreats to the loo.

The toilet is shoddy too, broken porcelain and cracks in the mirror; he brushes his teeth with water that tastes strange and doesn't think.

Returning to the flat proper, he has the misfortune to discover that the bed is of the same quality as the rest of the furniture – basically a large mattress, blankets and pillows scattered over it.

Both of them are mostly dressed, pressed to opposite edges of the mattress, and yet Adrian shudders when the makeshift bed dips under Rick's weight. For some reason it makes Rick swallow, fingers white around the blanket.

_It's my father…_

And you shouldn't presume things, but really.

He might even be right, this once.

"I'm going to make things better," he says, defiant in the darkness. "I'm going to be great, and the world will be great. I'm going to become the Prime Minister and it's going to be, like, the Golden Rick Era."

Then there won't be kids like him and Adrian, and Mum would've lived with him, and there would've been a dad, and people won't turn their backs on him for reasons that make no sense.

"Sure," Adrian says, cuttingly, muffled. "You stupid sod, it doesn't work that way."

"I'm going to _make_ it work that way!"

"Whatever, gitface. Just shut the hell up and let me sleep."

"Fine, whatever," Rick concedes. That does it, I'm taking this prat on as a challenge. "G'night."

He sleeps rather well, all things considered. Wakes up in the morning because of the sunlight poking at his eyes; moans in protest and rolls over to avoid it, only to stop short as he nudges against a warm bundle.

Oh. That's right. Adrian. Smith, wasn't it, and yeah right that's his real name, but Rick has his own secrets, never mind he's no good at keeping them.

Cautiously, curiously, he levers himself up on one elbow, leaning over to get peer at the other boy's sleeping face, see if there actually is a face beneath all the scows and frowns. Turns out there is, ordinary features pale with tiredness, a reddish tint to one cheek that might be from a pillow-mark or a pimple-colony, chapped generous lips open in sleep.

"Hey," he calls. "Hey, Sleeping Beauty, time to get up."

When this exhortation offers no results other than Adrian curling further into his pillow, hiding his face between his hair and the blanket, Rick closes a hand around his shoulder, shaking lightly, impatiently. The response comes much faster this time, in the shape of a fist connecting with his cheek.

"Bloody hell!" he hollers, throwing himself away from the offending knuckles and landing in a clumsy crouch. "The hell are you doing, bastard!"

Large, sleepy eyes focus on him; the fist lowers slowly.

"Sorry," Adrian offers, though doesn't sound like he means it. He does put some ice on the injured cheek later, when they're having breakfast. It is when he lowers one hand from the packaged ice pressed against Rick's face that Rick notices the discoloured skin darkening his knuckles, a pretty damn ugly kind of scar.

Clearly seeing his look, Adrian says, "Don't," in the sharp, final voice that means this is brittle.

The short walk to Mike's Hotdog Place is composed of chill morning sunlight, Rick yawning until his jaw cracks and rubbing at his eyes. Adrian hides his hands in his sleeves, probably cold and tired and miserable but too fucking rich-kid proud to admit it. Well, at least he's not whining.

Inside, when they've warmed and woken up properly, they somehow end up having this completely stupid competition about who can sell the most meals. Rick advertises his wares brightly, yelling and gesturing, but unfortunately Adrian's grumpy, superior face doesn't put him at as much of a disadvantage as it should since he's also quiet and efficient and passably polite.

The only thing dumber than the contest itself is the fact they eventually discover that they've both lost count of their sales.

Rick is in a slightly better mood when they return home that evening, stopping to pick up some more groceries because it's not fair Adrian's eating food Rick's paid for without contributing. He won't take charity.

They have a weird kind of stew that Rick's mum used to make, the recipe of which it becomes sadly apparent he does not remember quite as vividly as he thought. It tastes okay, though. A little spicy, but okay.

When they've eaten Adrian washes the dishes, then sits down with a really thick paperback.

Rick contemplates needling him but decides he has too much pride, slumps down as well and starts leafing through his old comics. Halfway through the third Marvel volume he looks up, itchy, and discovers Adrian's slumped over his no doubt boring book, eyes closed, breathing deeply through his mouth.

Finishing his comic, Rick pads quietly into the loo; it's still strange to see someone else's toothbrush in the mug beside his own, the black jumper slung over the shower cubicle to dry. Not bad-strange, necessarily.

Hearing someone else's sleeping noises is good too; it wasn't very long since his mum disappeared and left the quiet.

Yeah, it's – things are all right, even though Adrian is essentially an uptight bastard with major social issues and Rick's allegedly a loud stupid tool.

They are basically in isolation, lost in this crazy world together.

Adrian knows he is not quite sane, hasn't been for a long time, but he feels more real than he has in a while.

He studies Rick because frankly there isn't anything else to occupy himself with, and even a punk kid with ADD is more entertaining than the interior of a shoddy hotdog place.

When it's finally lunch break he initially intends to escape the horrible joint, but Rick grabs at him again. "Hey, dumbass. We can eat here, if we want. Mr Mike's cool once you get to know him."

So they end up chewing over-cooked hotdogs behind the counter, and if he hadn't been so bloody hungry it probably wouldn't have been half so delicious.

"Why're you such a bloody antisocial git?" Rick demands between mouthfuls of mashed potatoes.

"I just don't like people," Adrian says, glaring. So stay away from me.

"You're such a fucking waste," Rick says in a huff. "I mean, they were all willing to like you, you've got that fancy upper class accent and the manners, you could've been nice, could've made friends."

"Well, clearly I don't want to. What the hell's your problem? Why don't you go fraternize yourself, if you want to so badly? Sod off and leave me alone."

Rick gives him a hateful look but stays uncharacteristically quiet. What can he says? People want Adrian, but Adrian doesn't want them. Rick does, but everyone knows who his mother was, and what, and they wouldn't touch him with ten-foot pole. At least Mike's warmed to him; but there's no way I'm telling Adrian.

No way he's giving the bastard an unfair advantage, or reason to turn further away.

"I always wanted a dog," he says at last instead, brushing crumbles off his lap.

Adrian raises an eyebrow in what could be interpreted as interest or dismissal, he too dusting himself off, chucking the plastic fork in the rubbish bin.

"Yeah," Rick goes on. "Since I was a kid. They're all soft and happy and friendly, you know? But I never could, pets are expensive and messy and stuff."

Adrian doesn't reply, but he doesn't tell him to shut the hell up, either.

Work's better with someone else, and the evenings too become acceptable. Rick spends a good many off them out pulling pranks, and Adrian too flees, goes running through the unfamiliar streets until everything in the world tastes of blood and he can't breathe.

It's not unusual for him to feel this way; at least if it's because he's been exhausting himself he doesn't have to think about it so much.

"You're a retard," he tells Rick sometimes.

"And you're a sourpuss," Rick replies with something like happiness, giving him the bird. "Hey, come on, it's a great idea!" He's insisting they do something fun during the weekend during which Mike's will be closed for repainting.

It's a horrible idea, but Adrian is sick of the dingy flat and gives in with a huff. He even agrees to prepare half the picnic sandwiches, if only because he knows Rick would mess them up completely and then he'd be stuck trying to eat jam/tuna or something.

"This is going to be _great_!" Rick declares when they venture out late next morning, running a few steps ahead and waiting up with a big goofy grin and waving arms. "I haven't been on an outing since I was a kid."

Most people haven't, Adrian doesn't say. Just shakes himself awake and picks up the pace, keeping up with the jubilant fool chattering in his ear.

(it's a beautiful day)

("_disgusting_")

"This way," Rick decides, taking off with the backpack swinging in his hand.

"No," says Adrian, who has no desire to be frolicking with families. "This way." To underline his point he rips the backpack from Rick, slinging it over one shoulder and walking the other way.

"Hey!"

They steal it back and forth probably twenty times, hunting each other this way and that across the quiet street until they're both out of breath and there's soft laughter.

Finally they proceed to establish that compromising just means doing what no one really wants by settling for a bench in the deserted suburbs, far from the greenery areas. It's all right, blue-painted tree to sit on, and anyway they've both grown hungry, didn't have breakfast.

Rick spreads himself out over the entire bench, spilling gangly limbs all over it, resting the back of his head against the edge of Adrian's shoulder.

"Sit up by yourself."

"Don't wanna."

"I don't care."

"Aww, don't be such a bastard all the time. Am I too heavy for poor weak little Addy?"

Given that Adrian wrestled the damn backpack from him about twelve times and completely outran him, he ought to know that's bullshit.

"Don't call me that," he orders, reaching into the pack for the sandwiches.

"Hmm," Rick mumbles, sounding content, leaning more heavily as he munches.

The sun is warm and bright. Adrian tips his face back and thinks of nothing.

I'm free from all of that now.

(i have to be)

"Damn," Rick mutters eventually, still in the low husky voice of someone who was recently half asleep. "I'd forgotten. School starts again the day after tomorrow."

Adrian glances at him, noting crumbles around the perpetually-animated mouth. "You go to school?"

For a wonder Rick isn't insulted. "Have to," he says with a vague gesture, "or Social Services get on my case. I'm already – I mean, they think I'm living with my mum. So if I don't keep in line and they do a home inspection or something…. I've had enough of foster care."

He makes a face, doesn't seem childish anymore despite the stupid pink hair and the lack of basic table manners.

Not that Adrian's an expert on childhood in any form or shape.

"Where is your mother, then?" The words slip out, only half a challenge.

We've known each other for a week, give or take. What do I care?

Oh, that's right.

There's – there isn't anyone but them, anymore.

Rick's face goes unaccustomedly solemn, with that same stubborn streak of kindness. "She's gone."

Dead or whatever, Adrian concludes. She's run away and left him, or she's been taken away, by the police or some gang or whatever.

He isn't sure why he admits, "Mine too."

("mother won't be coming home anymore")

That was long ago and far away, though.

Rick grins, a strange, sad expression. Fucking unquenchable retard.

And, _because there's – I've kind of got someone now. _Don't I, you creepy sourpuss? – because of that Rick offers, in a fast soft voice, "She was a whore. A crack whore. But really she was just lonely. And hungry."

Adrian doesn't move or respond. Just sits there, doesn't go away.

Next day they're back at work, and nothing has changed.

The day after that Rick goes to school, leaving Adrian alone on the morning shift. Mike's Hotdog Place has never been quite so quiet or dingy, and he's only distantly aware that the loneliness should be a relief. In the cold emptiness he sells cheap food and cleans up after sloppy eaters, thinking again, carefully, of nothing.

Because most subjects are dangerously painful.

When Rick eventually trudges home on heavy feet and collapses all over the kitchen table he directs half-closed, bemoaning eyes at his flatmate, reaching gluttonously for the meagre dinner that boredom has compelled Adrian to fix them; there are only so many times you can re-read even your favourite novel, and Rick's comics are frankly not very tempting.

Yeah, sure I liked them. Then I turned five.

There's a library, but acquiring a card requires an ID, so he can't bring anything home.

"Lucky you," Rick moans eventually, resting his head on a worn text book. "You don't have to suffer through ninth grade, you spoiled bastard."

"I already did."

"What? But I thought…" He hoists himself upright, making a large, confused gesture indicting that hey, you can't be all that much older, can you?

I'm not.

"I skipped ahead," Adrian explains shortly, then adds with a testy, teasing smirk: "I've graduated. I'm qualified to start university."

The concept is – unreal, here in the dim chill kitchen, utensils and school books on the small table between them. Rick stares at him and can't imagine it, despite all the fancy habits Adrian tries in vain to obscure; the fine accent, the too-expensive clothes, the dead-polite intonation and the neat-freak ideas of one brought up with perfect manners and professional cleaners.

In all the obvious ways Adrian sticks out, and yet Rick is dead certain he belongs, here with me in this icky situation that's been made all right, somehow.

"Well, well, well," he says. "Aren't you Mr Smarty-Pants? Know what, you can do my homework, it's brilliant!"

"No it's not," Adrian argues with a faint line across his forehead and a bit of a quirk to the corner of his mouth, right where his lips meet. Changing the subject seems like a good plan, because he knows Rick can go on and on forever once he gets stuck on an idea. "Anyway, I thought you'd like going to a place where you can meet some nasty friends."

"Ah," Rick says uncertainly. Adrian is looking at the edge of his plate, poking at it violently with his fork. "It's not bad, but I'm not like them. I'm the delinquent kid all the time. Of course, I'm going to make them see I'm much more than that, but… Eh, just wait 'till I'm Prime Minister!"

Maybe then he won't have to sit alone in the cafeteria or get accused of cheating every time he passes a test. Not that that's very often.

"Seriously, though," he adds. "I still think you could help out with the homework. It's only fair, sharing is caring, you know."

Adrian looks faintly glad. "No," he says. "I've done ninth grade already."

Though when the pressure grows worse, when work eats up too much of the study time and the teachers start mumbling threats about an extra PTA, he pitches in with a sigh.

"You're such an idiot," he mutters. Rick is watching in fascination over his shoulder as fast scarred hands go through his books. Adrian turns pages faster than Rick can read a paragraph, scribbles answers to impossible equations with barely a second's pause for thought. "This is kids' stuff."

"Is not! Just because you're some kind of creepy genius." But he's warm and grinning, resting a sharp chin on Adrian's shoulder. Adrian freezes when the pressure of contact hits him, the hot breath washing over his ear, but after a moment's deliberation he ignores it, as best as he's able, and goes on solving Math problems.

As revenge and reward both Rick drags him out to play basket two days later. In the wet, chilly weather, with moistness hanging like fog in the air, the goalpost in the little park Adrian sat in that first terrible (far-away) afternoon is mercifully deserted.

Adrian's good, quick and stubborn, but Rick's the one who's used to crawling in through the little window of the barrack containing toys and kid bikes and stuff at the edge of the park in order to liberate a ball, the one who brings absolute gleeful determination to the game.

Also he's the one who first resorts to picking up a handful wet leaves from the ground and hurling them like a rotting snowball.

"Son of a bitch!" Adrian exclaims, staring in bewildered disgust at his jumper, now dripping with the trees' refuse.

"Sucker!"

"Oh, just you _wait_…!"

And the rest, as the saying goes, is history. Of the messy, inevitable kind, in this case: the Leaf Battle of the Playground, starring Adrian of the Socially Maladjusted Genius Jerks and Rick of the IQ-Deficient Loud-Mouthed Show-Off Idiots.

Afterwards they stumble home, soaking wet and horribly dirty and breathless with glee.

Next morning, of course, they are met with the much less pleasant discovery that they are both running out of semi-clean clothes.

"We'll have to book in laundry," Adrian decides.

Rick looks glum but nods, poking cautiously at what might be a pair of trousers or something nasty; there's a reason Adrian doesn't touch his things. Rick's been known to borrow, but Adrian has even less stuff than he does, so it's not really a workable strategy in the long run.

"That means you have to do it," Adrian clarifies. "You're the one who actually rents the place."

"Um," Rick says, subdued suddenly but grinning hesitantly through it. "Technically it's my mum. But I learned to forge her sign perfectly before I could write my own name, so that's all right."

"Right," Adrian says tonelessly. "I doubt anyone here will care. I can do it."

"So can I. It doesn't matter."

And it doesn't: because Adrian doesn't trust Rick operating machinery more advanced than a toilet and Rick refuses to be bored to tears alone waiting for the laundry to be done, they're both there anyway, when they both finally get an afternoon off.

It's a shitty room; Adrian's never actually seen a Laundromat before, so maybe this is all normal, but the putrid stench isn't inviting. Oh well, if you can ace university math you can probably work a Laundromat, right?

When they finally get it running he sits down atop it Indian style, preparing to write an essay on Third World economy. Not an uninteresting subject: the challenge is to do it badly enough the teachers will actually believe Rick could've written it. He learned that lesson the first time his piece came back with a big fat red note saying cheater, cheater, cheater.

"Boring," Rick whines when he's halfway done with the first sentence, leaning forward over his legs, elbows on my knees, knuckles against my thighs. Adrian can't move, can't think, can't breathe.

His heart has forgotten how to beat, and when it remembers it is with a vengeance, pounding frantically.

"Hmm," Rick speculates. "I've got it. See if you can read this." And he starts tracing figures on Adrian's body.

"Idiot," Adrian huffs, less steadily than he'd have liked.

"Nah. Not a letter right. You suck."

"That's rich, coming from someone who can barely read!"

"Can too. Go on, I'll prove it!"

"Fine," Adrian says, gathering his bearings and dragging a concentrated fingertip over Rick's cheek.

Trail and error proves that faces, legs, and backs are fairly easy to read from; sides and stomachs are tickly, and palms can make you twitch strangely.

Adrian can't remember the last time he was touched gently. Can't remember touching anyone else voluntarily at all.

Rick has his eyes closed in concentration, mouth shaping soundless syllables while Adrian traces _megalomaniacal _down his neck, when the washing machine beeps to signal it has finished with their laundry.

Recovering the damp clothes, Rick studies a pair of trousers that have gone from vaguely ghetto-stylish to just plain trash.

"Shit," he grumbles. "Cut me some slack here, these were my favourite pair."

"Why do you wear that anyway?"

"I'll have you know punk is a very cool and interesting style that has a lot to say about society," Rick claims grandiosely, lightly flushed. "It's about caring about the important things, not materialistic shit."

"Whatever."

"Also, um," Rick admits as they make their way back upstairs, rueful and a little sheepish, "I can't afford to buy new stuff just because my old clothes are getting worn."

"Right," Adrian says uncomfortably.

"What? You're poor too, you know."

"Yeah," he says, a little struck. "But that's because I've chosen it."

He still can't imagine a world without money, that financial safety net.

"Um," he says. This is stupid; maybe Rick's contaminated me with his dumbness. "If – I'm pretty sure it's traceable so don't do anything reckless, but if things get bad, if it's necessary – there's a credit card hidden behind the mirror in the loo." He turns his head sideways, eyes down, and hisses the code in Rick's ear.

Because you don't grow up with the fancy crowds without growing paranoid.

Then, because this is awkward in some strange, flushed way: "Time you skipped the punk hair, at least."

"I like my hair like this!"

Two weeks later he concedes defeat, though; the pink was great, felt happy and familiar and look at me! but dying the roots is unnecessary cost and bother, and the outgrowth is getting longer than the pink. He cuts it off in the toilet, mourning the lost colourfulness.

"Pity," he remarks afterwards. "But hey, we're pretty damn alike now." He puts his head close to Adrian's and pulls at a tuft of the other's hair, attempting to compare the really very similar nuances.

"No we're not," Adrian says immediately and stiffly, then adds, distractedly, "It's dyed."

"No it's not," slips out of Rick's mouth. Who dyes their hair bland? Well, yeah, okay, maybe people like Adrian.

"Yes, it is."

He thinks about moving away. He should. He can't make his body move.

_There are things you can't let go off._

(the burns on his hands itch; but not so badly anymore)

His hair is a rather exceptionally distinctive hue, which means he really ought to be discreet, but proving Rick wrong has become very important, on any number of instances; he falls for the folly yet again and refrains from dye for the next month, doing his best to wear a hat on all occasions.

"Look at that," Rick exclaims when he finally rips it off to examine the silver-blondness thus exposed. "You're all pretty."

Adrian gives him a pleased smirk. Pleased because now Rick sees he was right all along and his hair was indeed dyed, of course.

But there's nothing else and no one else matters, and it's them.

One evening, five months almost after Adrian moved in, with darkness lying heavy between the street lights, they're walking home and come upon the sounds of fighting: the sickening noise of a fist or foot meeting softer flesh, the grunts.

_Shit_, Adrian thinks, and quickens his steps, walking fast with his hands in his pockets and his gaze on his feet. Until, with predictable idiot heroism, Rick turns and runs the other way, towards the sodding noise.

Intellectually Adrian is keenly aware there are other options, but the main part of him doesn't listen: just follows Rick.

Beneath a grey wall covered with fading graffiti three young men have cornered a boy who's crying softly at their feet: there is some serious ugly going on here. Rick's not going to stand for that.

"Stop!" he yells, kicking one of the guys in the knees before the bastard can turn around. "Leave the kid alone, fuckers!"

Adrian should let him go down. For some reason he doesn't.

For some reason it's not even an option in any sense but the abstract one.

"Hey," he calls, in the calm trained voice he uses with the press. "I'm calling the police if you don't quit it right now."

Unexpectedly, it works. Might be the upper-class accent that suggests the authorities will actually listen to him, might be how Rick has already downed one guy and the kid can't have been that fun to begin with, the whiny little brat.

Well, Adrian's done his bit, now the bad guys are scampering off. Rick can handle the boy, Adrian doesn't like children reminding him of things he'd rather forget, he wouldn't have bothered coming to the rescue. No, that was all Mr Stupid Altruistic I'm Gonne Be Prime Minster with the continent-sized like-me-complex.

He buries his hands deeper into his pockets, looking at the wet uninviting ground. Fucking eternal rain.

Then he hears the child's harsh, bright voice (and since when does _bright_ carry associations to Rick?), "You're the whore's son!" and he is staring after all.

Staring at Rick who's on his knees in front of the horrible brat they should've left to his untimely fate, offering that too-wise, too-_good_ smile that smoothes the childish, selfish, hurt line of his mouth.

"Yeah," he says. "I'm Rick. You all right?"

The kid nods, takes off hastily.

_Good riddance. _

"Bloody brat," Adrian mutters, when the disruption is gone and Rick is back at his side

"Yeah, well," Rick says, proud and cut and overcoming it all. "They don't know any better. I'll show them I'm great."

"Why do you even care?"

"I've told you." A painfully bright smile. "I'm going to be Prime Minister and fix everything."

And Adrian really doesn't care about his dumb delusions, and is that the only reason he doesn't refute the ludicrous claim?

"If you say so," he shrugs, and visualises Rick among the kind of false, suited, sponsored men who actually do become prime ministers.

That's a world apart, now; and they're going home.

Yeah, home. Things change.

Like they do again, drastically, nine weeks later when Rick bangs into the flat with a troubled expression on his face and a newspaper in his hand.

"There's an article," he announces in a dirty, faux-cheerful voice. "Sentimental bit for the holidays, you know. About this rich boy who ran away from home about seven months ago. His father's some real fancy official. Supposedly he has really blond hair, practically silver. Name's, oh you'll never guess, name's Adrian Peters. This sound familiar to you at all?"

"So you actually can read," Adrian unfreezes to say, putting the tea kettle down. "That's almost as impressive as unexpected."

"You _bastard_," Rick hisses in frustration. "Why won't you bloody tell me anything? You've heard about me, about Mum and how she disappeared and social services and everything! Why can't you trust me?"

(he bounds up the stairs, opening the door by a solid push of the hip; old technique, learned and practised long since. and the flat's – empty. nothing particularly unusual about that, though the place looks more …cleaned out... than could be considered natural)

(the chills certainty grows over the coming days and weeks that she is not coming back)

(dead, kidnapped, run-off – who knows?)

(and who cares, right)

(_i do_)

"Why should I?" Adrian snaps, fisting his hands until he feels the scars stretch and itch. "Are you going to magically fix it all when you become Prime Minister if I do?"

Rick looks hurt for once, and fucking _caring_, and furious.

"It's my business, I can take care of myself," Adrian says. "I don't need anyone to save me."

Not that anyone would, but that isn't the point.

I can handle it, he told himself, and he can. Not always well, but it does work.

"I want," Rick says tightly. "You – I mean. We're _friends_. Friends help each other."

"I don't have friends," Adrian says tonelessly. Never in his life. Just people I'm supposed to pretend with, just like family.

Rick goes white with what could he rage or shock or even a panicked kind of hurt. "Then what am I?" he demands through clenched teeth.

"_I don't know_!" And I don't. Turn to stare out the window.

Rick marches over, grabs his arm and twists him around, punches him on the mouth, cold-red knuckles over broad lips.

Reeling and relieved, Adrian lashes out in retaliation, his fist gracing Rick's jaw.

(thank fuck there's no work tomorrow)

"You're my friend," Rick says, with that impossible frantic force, so much more intensity than his fist had. "You are."

And Adrian doesn't want to think about that. Stands there with an aching mouth and Rick's fingers still around his arm, lifts his free hand to examine his abused lips.

Mistake, something in him cries, but he doesn't care, not even when Rick, rather predictably, grabs that hand too, dragging an experimental fingertip across the scar.

Adrian had never thought he'd disclose anything about this particular subject ("he played with the fire in the hearth, i'd told the nanny not to leave him alone, you know how curious children can be…"). It doesn't seem so impossible or so important, now there's someone he knows will believe. Will care, even, in some strange possessive retard way.

He offers something bleak and ugly disguised as a smile. "My father opted to teach me allegorically that playing with fire is not a good idea."

"Sod him," Rick says. "That's why people need me to make things better."

He doesn't let go of the hand.

(and bloody hell, for all intents and purposes they are holding hands)

The fact _we can do this_ chases a strange gladness through Rick, and he's absolutely, serenely confident. _Come what may, I've got you, sourpuss though you may be._

"I don't need you to make things better," Adrian says carefully.

"Well," says Rick, crooked grin. "That's – it's you."

"It's me," Adrian agrees dryly, more tolerant and amused than he should be, with Rick's hand around his and forbidden words spoken.

The typical brilliant Rick smile, sun-bright and overwhelming. "It's us. We can do this."

"Whatever," says Adrian, but when he tugs loose it's gently.

Things aren't good but they're better. After dinner, since it's Christmas and holiday spirit and they're free the day after, Rick breaks out the alcohol Mike offered them as a kind of present; I got too many bottles of the wrong sort, figured you could use a break, yeah?

Rick does not often drink (particularly since inebriation once lead him to ask a girl if she wanted to _polish my diamond_, and good god, the humiliation), but he imbibes with concentration and laughs.

They're in the bedroom because it's pretty much their only room, and the mattress is more comfortable than the ratty kitchen furniture. The radio's been carried in from its normal place beside the oven and is playing horrible cheesy Christmas carols that make Adrian grimace.

"I want music," Rick whines when he turns it off.

A cold, exasperated look, and then Adrian bends over his well-guarded backpack and retrieves a small item, chucking it at his companion.

Catching it clumsily, cradling it, Rick examines the item and identifies it as an mp3-player. It's small and sleek and full of harsh depressing music, and without question hideously expensive.

"Keep it," Adrian says, nonchalant, unfriendly. "I don't use it here anyway, and if I ever go back I can get another."

Before Rick has replied he grabs one of the mugs with juice-and-unlabeled-alcohol-mix; gags hard on it.

"This," he says dryly, "is definitely not a quality wine."

While undoubtedly true, this observation does not stop him drinking it.

"You're not, though, right?" Rick says after downing a mug of his own. "Going anywhere, I mean. I won't let you."

He hadn't meant to say that last. Hadn't meant to _mean_ that last.

"I," Adrian says eventually. He's sitting on the floor with his knees drawn up to his chest, back against the mattress over which Rick is sprawling on his stomach. "Everything I ever wanted is a sin. But the things he did!"

He is furious and humiliated, feels the burn, the old hurt. Does manage to disengage from it a little, for the first time, and doesn't speak again.

There's no need.

"Hey," Rick starts, but Adrian cuts him of by refilling the mugs.

"Thanks," Rick says eventually, in a soft heavy voice.

"It's…" He shrugs.

His voice has gone lower, deeper, and Rick discovers after some time that the world is sparkly and that he can't see too well, colours blurring and bright.

"Hey," he murmurs again, crawling forward with more enthusiasm than coordination, and Adrian startles at the presence of a warm hand on his face.

"What're you doing?" he asks evenly, in a voice that has gone breathy and strange from intoxication.

Rick isn't sure how well he manages to articulate the idea that since his eyes do not seem to be working properly he thought it'd be funny to try the blind-game; feeling someone's face, learning their features.

Surprisingly, whatever he says is enough for Adrian to let him.

There is dye-coarse hair and softer skin under his fingers, the fuzzy arcs of eyebrows and lashes, sharply defined bones. He cups one hand over the left side of Adrian's face, palming the jaw, fingers catching in the hairline and ear; his other hand explores closed lids and a thin nose and wide, swollen lips.

An exhalation hits his fingertips, and there's Adrian's touch light on his face, and whoa, this is _nice_, short nails whispering across his skin and a palm arching over the back of his head.

Disoriented and focused, sitting on the floor of the dingy bedroom, Adrian thinks complex and dirty thoughts about his father and drags Rick forward to kiss him as hard as he can.

Lips, open and wet with all manners of vile liquids, the pressure of teeth, the clumsy wanton fury of moving tongues.

And I'm not thinking about my father at all anymore, which is a different kind of first.

They snog until they can't breathe, ending up with both of them sprawled incoherently over floor and bed, faces close, foreheads and noses brushing.

"Ah," Adrian says, and Rick inches forward with no hesitation at all.

…he wakes up the next morning rather sweaty from what is probably a combination of having slept too close to Rick while almost fully clothed and the nausea stemming from his absolutely disgusting hangover.

"Oh, bloody hell."

At least he makes it to the toilet before he throws up, although some stumbling was involved.

Shit. What the hell have I done?

He's never actually been hung-over before. He also has never felt good snogging anyone on a bed before.

I am disgusted I do not feel disgusted. I am going insane (_too late_).

When Rick ambles up Adrian is in the kitchen, gulping cold water in an only partially successful attempt to improve the situation.

"Morning," Rick says with a horrible yawn, stretching to scratch his neck so his jumper rides up on his stomach. His face is sleep-rosy and known, a little sick and not nearly uncertain enough.

"I have to go," Adrian says.

"We're off work," Rick replies, smile fading.

"Right," says Adrian, reminding himself that he might still have to vomit again; going outside really isn't a brilliant plan.

Staying turns out to be much less terrible than he'd thought. Rick messes with the mp3-player, offering juvenile and delightedly cutting commentary on the songs. Adrian sits in the far corner of the bed and distracts himself writing a thesis about how the influx of Christmas-prompted charity money might best be distributed.

But they have four entire days off.

Going to bed is an enormously awkward exercise. Rick's already beneath the blanket when Adrian re-emerges from the toilet, grinning and flushing and curled up instead of sprawled out like usual.

Adrian suddenly and inexplicably feels calmer.

It's just Rick; _It's us. We can do this._

Falling asleep is hard because Rick is breathing warm wet-ish air on his neck, bathing it in the pliant smells of toothpaste and the sweet nuts he munched on.

In the morning he's still permeated by that peculiar serenity. I look at Rick who looks back, and this place we've made is warm and comfortable, and hand meets thigh.

They're too close, in all the ways imaginable, and…and the world's crazy, but crazy doesn't have to be bad. Right now it isn't, for certainly it's mad to be kissing again, hot and hard, and it's – it's not supposed to be like this.

It is, though. It really, really is.

They kiss a lot in the bed. And in the kitchen, and in the bathroom, and once outside. Rick's hands develop the tendency of lingering on Adrian's body.

Later, many hours (two days, more) later, they end up in bed in the sexier sense.

That stupid article in the paper left a sense of doom, Judgement Day is coming to call, and it, it might very well be now or never, so there's just no time to hesitate, especially when you're desperate, even if you're not entirely certain what exactly it is you're desperate for.

"I'm going to have you now," Rick says. He's braced above him, one hand rubbing over his chest, creasing the shirt over a taut nipple. "Are you, um, ready?"

"What do you think?"

(think? but i know you, adrian)

I have never actually done this before; but Adrian's stomach is tempting and smooth, a sheen of sweat and the occasional splotch of rougher skin under Rick's palm as he lets one hand glide down Adrian's hip, in between his thighs. There's a little noise as his fingers come into contact with Adrian's erection, the strange hard heat, so unbelievable.

Can't believe he's never done this before, because his breath is catching, and this is _Adrian_, stupid uptight my Adrian not-Smith.

He offers a corresponding noise of his own, harsh and breathy, as Adrian pulls him down, mouth to mouth, crotch to crotch between Adrian's spread legs.

His lips quirk around a kiss, tender and aroused and with something that could've been a laugh if this hadn't meant the world. "You little slut."

It's a delighted utterance, and sluts' a good word; means you do it just because you want to.

Nothing at all like a whore.

Adrian, who might not agree with this line of reasoning, looks about to punch him before Rick distracts him with a movement; bites his ear instead, hard, and they're both shuddering as Rick moves sharply again in response.

"Nn," Adrian groans, his head thrown back, pale blondness and bland brownness all over the dirty pillow. He could come from just the thought, Rick moving over him, the crazy exclamations Rick no doubt whispers into his mouth.

Their first time isn't great, not by a long shot; frantic from fear as much as from lust, and clumsy and raw.

Still pretty damn good.

Afterwards I am reeling, pleasantly scattered. Far away from myself; but closer to you than I have ever been to anyone, I think.

Not an Adrian thing to say, certainly. He just sighs instead, softly.

Things are surprisingly normal. They still play basket at the playground, and throw snowballs, and eat shit food. Fight over whose turn it is to clean the bathroom, have stupid arguments at work. Also decide the bed is larger and nicer when you aren't trying to keep away from someone else in it.

Snog on the stairs, taut bodies pressed into walls and each other. Laugh about stupid neighbours leaving crazy complaints.

A million inconsequential moments that mean so much more than they should.

Adrian finishes the essay on charity-distribution, and when the landlord comes to complain about Rick (too loud, always imposing his greetings and cheerfulness on the other residents, and if the rent is a single second late…) in the middle of January Adrian takes care of it. He can handle politicians, with the perfected masks that spare his actual self any social interaction (that's not for them); this is nothing. A little cruder, a little colder. I'll live.

Eight months, give or take, have passed since Adrian moved in when Rick comes home from school one day and finds their flat as empty as their workplace.

_He wouldn't leave me!_

Shit, shit, shit, where is the stupid bastard?

He's Rick's bastard, stupid though he may be, and Rick's the only one who's bloody well allowed to get him into trouble.

(_things that would have broken lesser men_; adrian's thought, long ago, and not about himself)

His legs ache and the stitch in his side is seriously trying to kill him when he has finally stumbled through the late February afternoon, flushed and panting despite the palpable chill, and comes upon the scene.

Adrian is standing with his back to a lamppost, arms crossed over his chest, hands hidden in his armpits, facing a forbidding, dark-suited adult.

"Adrian," he calls out to the other's profile, to the raised brow and wide eyes and the beautiful mouth startled open in the suddenly off-white face. Stumbling the rest of the way as fast as he can across the ice-slippery street, he grabs Adrian's arm to steady them, leaning close, looking up to study the suited man.

Adrian does not look at him but allows his arm to be pulled free, touches a finger to Rick's hand as he closes it around Adrian's wrist, feeling the dull, irregular pulse against his palm.

He squeezes back, staring with defiant apprehension at a severe grown-up face he realises he recognises. From a little photograph, in an article featured during Christmas, about a boy named Adrian who'd run away from home. From a man with the same absolutely unmistakable off-silver hair.

"What do you imagine you are doing?" Minister Peters inquires in an exceptionally condescending tone, chill eyes that aren't anything at all like Adrian's estimating and summarily failing them.

(this is mr peters. this is the reason adrian ran away)

(it's just us)

"Go to hell," Rick snaps, scared and bristling. He too only spares a heated glance for the opposition – the real deal's beside him, the steady grey gaze that, yeah, you can see everything. "He's mine."

"I've told you," Adrian says. "I don't need you to protect me."

"Excuse me," Mr Peters starts, sounding horribly amused.

"Shut up," Adrian tells him, like he's speaking to an unwanted but unimportant interrupter.

We're staring at each other, in the cold of late-winter dusk, and the intensity builds higher and higher until surely the sky must be breached.

Something funny is going on inside him, something all hot and soft.

"You are his?" Mr Peters inquires, less amused but still condescending, still disbelieving and scornful.

"I am," Adrian confirms immediately, like instinct, then looks absolutely flabbergasted at his own words. "No, I mean, I…"

"Heh," says Rick, tender scoffed syllable, hard bright smile. I'm not letting go, and you aren't either. "C'mon."

"Did you not," Mr Peters cuts into the conversation like a surgeon making an incision, precise and lethal, and there is no amusement at all left now, "run away to be your own?"

(_to see whether it was within my capacity?_)

Thoughtful, Adrian tilts his head minutely to the side. Hard too, and brilliant as well, in a stark beautiful way. "I ran away to become me," he decides eventually.

Mr Peters reaches for him; he steps away, Rick pulling at him, and they're pressed flush together, side against side.

For reasons he chooses resolutely not to explore at present (or ever) Adrian gives the nastiest smirk he can manage and right here, in front of his father, he goes soap opera on them and tilts his head like a harlot and gives Rick a wet, messy kiss.

"Adrian," Mr Peters says stiffly. "This is not over."

Neither are we. Oh, neither are they.

Rick smiles softness, still holding his hand, and they're walking fast and close together, off and away, quick as a cat.

Home is a respectable distance away, and the air is growing rapidly colder, bodies rapidly hotter; like a stupid cliché they stumble into a public restroom, predictably deserted at this hour.

This is crazy, wild unstoppable madness and potentially _so good_; Rick wants to see his face, he always does, but there's no time, and besides that wouldn't be comfortable in the enclosed space.

Adrian stands facing the minimal sink, bracing his lower arms against it, meeting his own gaze in the dirty mirror for a moment (oh yes, a very bad girl). His trousers have been fumbled open; and they'd have never thought they could – _this_, us – but they were wrong and it's… necessary, almost.

His underwear is pulled down, and there's the sound of a zipper being opened.

Hot exhalations against his jaw, sloppy biting kisses along his neck, some prodding and then a push forward that fills him unto bursting. His spine arcs under Rick's touch, bristling like an upset kitten's.

Crazy doesn't begin to cover it.

Nor does brilliant.

Fucking like dogs in heat in a public toilet, without proper lube or even a greased rubber.

"We should've," he mutters afterwards, wiping ineffectively at the wetness sticking to his buttocks and thighs, interjecting before Rick can get all mushy, "used a condom, at least. Bloody mess."

A feral grin, its edges smudged by sleepy softness. "I'd like to knock you up," Rick mumbles, mouth opening around the words, closing around Adrian's lower lip.

He raises an eyebrow, stroking Rick's unruly hair with a languid hand, dragging nails up the nape of his neck.

"I'd have an abortion."

"I," Rick starts, moving to hold him, tight and possessive like the orphan he is. "I think I might beat you up, if you did."

He smirks very dryly, but feels himself clutching harder. "My father would be only too happy to put you in jail for that."

"Then you'd come visit me," Rick says into his throat, the words vibrating their way into him. "And I'd reach for you through the bars."

Adrian shifts until they're kissing properly again, hotly, wildly. "I don't want you," he claims. "I want you all the time."

"Obviously," Rick agrees with a grin really too wide to fit his face, smudging all over the room.

"Whatever," Adrian mutters. "Let's go."

"Yeah, okay."

And they're home again and everything is the same and everything has changed, become charged.

Soothing fingers that want to twitch with familiar motions, Adrian prepares tea.

"That was your dad?" Rick asks. He almost says, _father_.

"Yes," Adrian says crisply. They're standing very close; Rick wraps his arms around Adrian's shoulders, leaning forward until their faces are touching. For a wonder Adrian does not complain, and Rick obsesses over all the familiar little details, the uneven shape of Adrian's left ear, the silver-blond warring with brown, the place below his fringe where pimples are wont to develop. Those steady, remorseless grey eyes, fixed now on the tea kettle, obscured by flimsy lashes. Rick is transfixed by his mouth, kissed warmly red, the place where words and smiles and intimacy starts. It moves now, adding, "He's not going to stop at this."

And Rick's arms are very hard around him.

"Right," Adrian says at last. "I've – it has to be worth it. Wait. Come."

Rick follows him into the bedroom, where he searches through his backpack for a mobile phone Rick hasn't once seen him use, just as sleek and expensive as the mp3-player.

"Tomorrow," Adrian says, in a voice dead-determined and calm, briskly decisive, "we are going to make a journalist very, very happy, but in case there's – trouble… Here, see this number?" Rick leans forward and does, a long row of glowy numbers. "This is the editor lady you will be calling if we're separated. Tell her you've got a story that's all her wet dreams come true, you've proof Rightwing Minister Peters' son's queer." His smile is small and stark, bitterly brilliant; shy with the unaccustomed expression. "Sod privacy. I don't care anymore."

They sleep very close together, even though that's really too hot and rather uncomfortable besides. There's no easy way to fit sharp body-parts together, but easy isn't always preferable.

Next day Adrian cuts off all the dyed hair, leaving him with a short halo of unmistakable silver-blondness, and puts on the cleanest, most expensive clothes he can find. Those he wore when he came here, only they were quite a bit fancier then. He wants to be recognized, for the first time since he ran away.

They take the buss to a plaza in the capital, where the paparazzi usually lay in wait for politicians, economical giants – and their offspring. It doesn't matter anymore whether he's traced, so they don't have to squander meagre savings on the tickets, share the earphones connected to the mp3-player; hold hands when they get off.

This'll be a scandal if there's ever been one. He can visualise the headlines: Minister Peters' Son Gay for Orphan!

The kind of scandal that can't be hidden away. They'll be remembered; won't be separated, if they're lucky and work hard for it.

Ah, right then, and he could grin. Does grin, an expression as fierce as it is rare, perfectly mirrored.

(_it's us._)

This is their best bet, distasteful though it might be.

And we're snogging under the flashing cameras, hot mouths and laughing breaths.

It's the two of them. Do what you have to do. _It's us._

"Hey," Rick says, when it's evening and they're on the tube, moist mittens sticking chilling to his hands; Adrian's being a nasty brat again and won't let him warm them under his jacket. "Maybe I knew it all along, but, um. I just realised. I love you."

"I know," Adrian says. We're still holding hands, pretty much. "You always were an idiot."

And the world's dirty and bleak and broken, but it's also what you make it.

It's us, love.

A four-letter-word, but something that reaches quite far beyond that, too, this love thing.

Happy ever after, baby.

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ENDNOTE: Okay, so after fifty-five chapters and six rewrites (not all of which, regretfully, took place before the initial posting, so the earlier chapters are really quite different by now) _La Belle_ is finished. I'm currently going through it to weed out the last remaining typos and similar minor mistakes, but it is done, and I'd like to direct my gratitude and appreciation to everyone who's offered amazing and lovely feedback, thus providing the best icing imaginable on the fanfic cake. I've loved writing this one, and can only hope the ending satisfies.

/elveljung

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